


There Will Come Soft Rains

by mellostopheles



Category: Deadly Premonition | Red Seeds Profile
Genre: F/M, Gen, Illustrated, Multi, Post-Canon, after the epilogue
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2018-11-21 17:49:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 30,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11362518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mellostopheles/pseuds/mellostopheles
Summary: "Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree / If mankind perished utterly". The case is over, and Francis Zach Morgan should be heading home, half as heavy as he was when he arrived. It has been hard trying to get his head around the many deaths he has witnessed in Greenvale, even without thinking about his personal losses. And that was before the sudden realisation that death is not always the final word. Something that someone else in Greenvale is now being forced to realise, as well.





	1. After the War

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again. Probably a lot of you reading this already read my last Deadly Premonition fic, Scenario B. Well, it's time for my next trek into Greenvale. This time, the story takes place during and after the epilogue of the game. There are a couple of particular divergences from canon, right at the endgame, but otherwise it is not an AU fic. Merely an... alternate ending, if you like. With a lot more time spent with the lighter-haired Agent Morgan. I hope you enjoy it! I'll be looking forward to seeing people's comments.
> 
> As a rather fancy and brilliant bonus, this fic is coming at you illustrated by the lovely and talented bumblepuppy! (http://bumblepuppy.tumblr.com/). So, I hope you also enjoy her brilliant illustrations at the ends of chapters.

**Chapter One [After the War]**

The trees outside the window shot past, one, two, three, four, blurry into infinity. Zach had to stop himself from looking. It was hurting his head, and it was already hurting enough. He touched his fingertips lightly to the thick, white bandage wrapped around his suddenly-snowy forehead. One of many reminders of what had happened over the past two weeks. It really had been just over two weeks, he had to remember. It was hard to, considering. Two weeks was not a lot of time for your entire life to change. The whole thing upended like a chess board, spinning across the floor, pieces scattered and lost. One particular king to never be recovered. And that, that last thing, that was still utterly unimaginable.

For the first time in a long time, Francis Zach Morgan was in full control of his life. For the first time ever, if he was to be honest with himself, as he doubted having control of the VCR when he was seven counted for much in the grand scheme of things. No. All this time, he had had someone with him. A hand to guide his arm, a voice to calm his thoughts. A public face to take the pressure off. No more. York, the figure that had stepped out of the darkness that had almost swallowed him up as a child, was gone at last. It was just like growing up, and maybe a decade too late. At thirty-three, after a lifetime of holding hands with his constant counterpart, Zach had no idea how to be alone. And he was so, so alone now.

Greenvale had been different. Most of their assignments took them to some city block or suburb for a few days, a week maybe, during which time they lived in a bubble. Other law enforcement, interviews, the eventual discovery of the suspect. No time for making friends. This time, he had made friends. He and York had been stuck in the sticks with, frankly, some highly unusual people. People they would never have normally spoken to, outside the confines of a police interview. And yet, it had started to feel like home. All too quickly, this place had started to feel like home. That was thanks to a select few people they had met, he knew that. That sense of home was not a place. It was people. It was all the fault of people who had made him feel like he had friends for a while. Friends outside himself. Outside of York. It was something new. Something that was lost now, too.

It was hard enough for him to have lost York. At least that had been by choice, even if it was not his choice. York had walked away of his own volition. For whatever reason. Zach could accept that. Not yet, of course, but he sensed that one day, later, he would be able to accept it. Otherwise, York would not have gone at all. His trust in York remained, even now that the man himself had vanished like the steam off cooling coffee. That trust assured Zach that he would survive without him. The same feelings did not extend to Emily. Not at all.

Zach could see her so clearly still, curled up on the wooden floor, resting under his jacket. If you could just erase the rest of the picture, maybe she might look like she was a sleeping girl in the back of his car, waiting to be driven home. He could not erase the rest of the picture. He could see the blood. The pulpy, stringy tendrils and the splatter that she had landed in. He could see the red, sapling tree that lay beside her like a skeletal twin. He could see it all, in his head, and he would see it forever. That room, the room where Emily had died, was where he had finally been brought back to the world. His second birthplace. Where he came to, and she was taken away. There was no doubt that he would remember every detail of it for the rest of his life. Even the parts that barely made sense.

York would understand them better. He would have understood everything that had happened far better than Zach did. Maybe if he was still here, he could have explained it all. Funnily enough, Zach would admit, it had all made sense in the moment. It was just sitting here now, in the quiet, sealed world of the car, that it started to seem unreal. Things sometimes do, when they are over. Even normal things can seem impossible when we look at them with the magnifying glass of hindsight in our dark bedrooms, later that night, all alone. That was all this was. York would have told him just that, that he was letting himself get confused after the fact. It had all made sense at the time. Why fight it now?

It was already too difficult to think about Forrest Kaysen. That man was wrapped in a world of implication, the spindle at the centre of a lifetime of loose ends. Daring to get near to him again, even in thought, was impossible without plucking on some of those strings. Zach was in enough pain, without opening up all that. The past could lie dead for one day, at least. There was nothing he could do for it now. He needed to heal in the here and now. York was gone. Emily was dead. He wanted to sleep it all away for at least a day or two. The hotel, with its huge bed and warm shower, was the only thing pushing him forward. That and the car, which he did not want to be in at all. He could have driven himself. That would have been better. That was where he would rather be.

He should have known, really, that Harry Stewart was involved somehow. The man set off far too many warning bells. No-one with a single sense of anything, or a personal history more than ten minutes long, would trust him. It was obvious something was wrong. York had been suspicious all along. Not specifically, but of something. He would have almost laughed at the truth, Zach thought. If he had been around to hear it. Harry had insisted on talking to him. He had been waiting for him in the lobby of the hospital the second Zach got the all clear to head home. A familiar, and unwelcome, sight. Zach was bundled into the backseat of the car and rushed to Harry’s home before he could even get his thoughts straight. He barely knew where he was, until he found himself standing in the hallway of the mansion, with Harry sitting beside him. All of a sudden eager to spill his guts about everything he had been hiding. Hiding until it was too late to matter. So, Harry had been George’s father all along. A fact that he had confessed with bitter urgency, as if Zach was the priest at his deathbed. Zach wanted to tell him that he was rushing things. With half the town dead, Harry looked better than ever. Healthier. He really seemed alive. The last rites were still a long way off, and Zach intended to be a distant memory before Harry needed any final comforts. Once he stepped out of this car, piloted by Harry’s loyal and, for now, mercifully silent shadow, he was going to gather up his things and check out of the hotel. Greenvale had taken everything it was going to take from him. He was leaving before it found something else to steal away forever.

Thinking of George was odd in itself. The man had never really liked him, or rather, he had never really liked York. They had butted heads, and despite the odd moment of respite where George had confided something in him, it was hard to view him as having been a friend. They had not been friends, but they had been something. Even if it was just that George had been the fourth corner to the neat square Zach had joined while working with the sheriff’s department here in Greenvale. York. He had to remind himself that it was all York. These people barely knew _him_. They had all known York. The only thing they knew of Zach was his face, and that was just because York had been wearing it. Regardless of who George had been directing his ire at, Zach had still got to know him. It was a real rarity in his line of work. The killers were always strangers to him. Facing George on that rooftop had felt different. Grimy. It was a tainted victory. Maybe it would have been less so if it had felt more like a fair fight.

George had always, since the very moment they met, been strong. In control. Obsessively so. Any challenge to his authority was met with aggression, as if the natural law and order of investigative jurisdiction was a personal slight against him. After discovering that he was the serial killer that they had been hunting, Zach would have expected George to fight tooth and nail to his last breath. He had expected a fight. A real, gruelling, back-breaking fight. Why then, he wondered, had George seemed like a scared little boy when they had met on the rooftop? After sending Emily off in the truck with Kaysen, unknowingly directing her to her doom, Zach had gone to confront the newly-unmasked killer in the sheriff’s department. More accurately, it was York who had gone, but Zach had been along for the ride. George had been hiding out in his own domain at the end. Though, hiding was not the right word. George had announced his presence as if he intended to challenge Zach to a duel. Two foes facing off, with just the victor walking away. A classic. Zach had been prepared for things to get tough. He and York both recognised a challenge when they saw one. They were going up to the roof to confront the violent killer of four women. A huge, over-muscled hunter with a grudge against them, whose life depended on ending theirs. It would not be easy. And yet, in the end, it was.

When Zach reached the rooftop, George was standing in the rain, swaddled in the tattered remains of a red raincoat. Clutching an axe. But the welcome Zach had expected never came. George hunched and shuddered away from him, babbling, pleading unintelligibly. Not with Zach, with someone else. Someone who was not there. Eventually with his mother. Whatever he was asking for did not materialise. When George realised that he was alone, a single man against an armed FBI agent, he had finally tried to rush Zach. Zach had shot him. George had keeled easily from the gunshot wound, though not before getting one good lick in. Zach had held off on shooting him for a second too long, and it had been Zach, and not York, that had made that decision. Leaving them both with an axe-graze to show for it. Blood loss from the wound, mixed with exhaustion, had sent Zach to the hospital, where he had slept uninterrupted for a day and a half while things went to shit behind his back. Before he had passed out, though, Zach had fixed the image of George, curled up and seeming smaller than he had ever seemed, in his mind. Something did not feel right. Zach had had to conclude that some part of George’s master plan had gone wrong. Some part had failed, and left him stranded on that rooftop, waiting for something that never came to pass. At the very end, he had not stood a chance, and Zach was not sure yet why.

Zach stared out at the trees zipping past the car window. So many of them. The beautiful, fresh-aired forest that he had seen when they first arrived was tainted now. Maybe it was because he was looking at it by himself this time. Maybe not. It would be a long time before he felt completely the same about trees again, after this. He would take some leave from work. Enough time to get better. He was injured, after all, so there was nothing much they could say. He needed the time. He had a whole new life to figure out. This was the first time he had ever been alone. Zach shut his eyes for a moment, tensing his brow. For now, it was best to take everything in steps. Get back to the hotel, get some coffee, and pack. He wanted to be gone by tomorrow morning at the absolute latest. Thank goodness his car was finally fixed. York’s car. _Their_ car. Everything Zach owned was theirs. There was nothing that was just his. That had never bothered him. It still did not. The trouble was that he had lost the person he shared with.

As he opened his eyes, Zach caught sight of something. Something in the trees, a flash of red. A streamer of colour. But the car kept moving, and it was already gone. He felt panic swelling in his chest. No. No, they had to go back. His mind must be playing tricks on him, but he had to know.

“Stop the car!” he cried out, surprising the driver as well as himself. “I mean, Michael, if you don’t mind. Stop the car. Let me out.” Michael nervously tapped the wheel as he considered the request, but pulled over by the side of the road. Zach was out of the door before the car had even stopped completely. He ran, cursing at his smoke-weary lungs as he struggled to suck in air, looking for it. For that second of red. He found the gate where it had been, and pushed through and on, into the woods. Somewhere here. If it had been real, if he could trust his eyes today, then it would have to be through here. The woods were loud. Squirrel chatter and birds in the background, loud and affronted, like he was interrupting their work day. He supposed he was invading their home, but he had no sympathy left for the world of trees. He was well aware that not everything in these woods could be trusted. It was not just the humans of Greenvale that reacted badly to the rain. More than once in the past few nights, he had almost run afoul of some aggressive, attacking crows. They were not going to drive him out of the trees today, offended though they may be by his presence.

Zach carried on forward, running, and then stumbling when he was out of breath, down the track. He knew he could not have really seen it. This was all a desperate final push to steal back something that was already gone. He knew that, but he did not stop. Even if it was impossible, he wanted it enough to go looking. There was a clearing ahead, and Zach stepped into it, finally using up the last of his lung capacity, and needing to stop. He bent forward and gasped, trying to fill his lungs as quickly as possible, so that he could keep playing his one-contestant scavenger hunt. After a moment, he lifted his head again, his mouth open for air, and froze. She was there. She really was there. In the centre of the clearing, surrounded on all sides by a ring of silvery birch trees, there she was. Not like she had been when they had last met. She looked like she had in the vision that Zach had already begun to doubt. The vision which had taken York from him, that had seemed unreal after a healthy dose of medication and bedrest at the hospital. A dream, he had thought, but here she was. Looking just the same. Emily.

She had died in his arms. After tearing the tree threading its roots around her organs out of her stomach, she had collapsed in his arms, and they had barely had a moment together to make peace before she died. Zach knew she had made the right choice. She was dying either way, and it might as well be on her terms. Not that it made it easier. Holding her suddenly lifeless body had felt like the end of the world. The end of the whole damn world. Her hair had been clinging to her chalky face, the colour was drained from her skin, and she had just looked wrong. Even without the blood dangling from her lips, her face gave it all away. That was why he had had to cover her with his jacket, and step away, so he could pretend she might get back up again. In the moment where she had died, when he had looked into her face, it was impossible to pretend she was anything other than lost forever. He had wanted so badly to replace that lasting image with something else. The picture of her as a sleeping girl in the back of a car. Anything. He would have given anything. Staring up at what could only be Emily now, he thought that she must have been listening to his plea.

“It is you, isn’t it?” he breathed. Not too loud, in case his words were enough to melt the illusion. They did not. If it was fake, it was made of glass, not ice. She remained, a figure in a red dress, her hair a glowing gold, and full of life. A person who, to anyone who was looking, would so clearly be alive. How?

Emily did not answer. Maybe she could not. She smiled, a soft thing, that could not have been faked. Emily’s smiles were usually polite at best and exhausted at worst, but this one was real. Zach knew that such a thing could not be replicated by anyone but her. He was terrified to admit that, in the second before he had seen it here, even he had not been able to remember it perfectly. No-one could fake it. He believed that with a certainty and a fire he did not know himself for. This was Emily. He was looking at Emily Wyatt. No matter how impossible that might be.

“You’re not a dream,” he murmured, slowly letting his confidence grow as hope began to flood his system. “You’re not a vision. Not a memory. I know it’s you. I _recognise_ you.” On some deep level that he would never be able to explain, he did. He did not even need her to answer, but, oh, he wanted her to. He wanted to hear her voice again. That sound that was meant to be gone. Broken seashell he thought he could no longer press to his ear, that was suddenly, strangely, repaired. He was not going to question it. He would not do anything to offend a miracle like this.

Emily smiled for him again, and turned. Zach felt a visceral tug in his chest, and staggered forward, after her. He had to stop her from going. He had to stop her as if his life depended on it. His legs felt bruised, weary, but he had no time for their nonsense. They were going to work. He would not lose Emily again.

“Wait, Emily, I’m coming!” he called out, disturbing the silence of the forest. She was already leaving, disappearing, back into the treeline. She would be gone, out of sight in a moment. He had to go now. As he took a clumsy step forward, there was a sound from somewhere, and Zach found himself on his knees on the grass. It had surprised him. He spun his head around, only to see that Michael had followed him from the car, and was now standing and holding his arms up defensively. Zach turned back to the treeline, where Emily had been, and no longer was. He had missed her. He had lost her again. Feeling the crushing weight of the realisation dragging him down deeper into the grass, he buried his face in his hands. This could not be the end. It could not happen to him again.

“Mr. Francis Zach Morgan…?”

Zach ignored it. He remained where he was. No-one in the world could move him right now. No-one except for her. The woods themselves were quiet at last. All the birds appeared to recognise his pain, and had decided, mutually, to give him some space. Or maybe he could just not hear them, with his hands over his head. The only thing he could hear was the insistent, unwelcome voice behind him, trying to drag him back to the car. To take him away from Emily.

“Mr. Francis Zach Morgan? Mr. Francis Zach Morgan…”

Maybe if he stayed like this for long enough, he would go away.

\- - -


	2. Wake Up Call

**Chapter Two [Wake Up Call]**

Bitten through, lipstick smearing, coughing, spitting. Shoving, screaming, gagging, sleeping. Heavy breathing. Others shouting. Carried, dragging, passing out. Where… where? But it smells familiar. Not since childhood. When he brought her in with broken skin on the kneecaps, possible concussion. Back in those tomboy days. Long, long ago. Calmer than he was, even then. Smells that way. Voices all around, all hushed and frightened. Reverence or apostacy. Divine or disgusted. Like he said. Like he said, trying to stop her speaking. Smell again. Voices. Worrying whispers, buzzing like electric current in the air. Always in the background, too far away to hear. No words can come out, maybe none can come in again, either. Is he coming? Is he coming? Which parts were real? Which parts were real, which were promises, and which never happened at all?

Heady smell of health, and tubes coming and going. Someone else’s blood wired in. Whose? Did they take it from one of them? Was this theirs, and will it turn to poison? Buzzing phones like cell phone chimes, never in focus. Pink dresses swish and sweep and short-nailed hands prod away. Dipping in and out while they write and chatter and discuss her like someone who is not in the room. Flies buzzing. You are nothing. One of us was meant to be the world.

There are no days anymore. Only dreams, and dropping out to visit. In the dreams, they are all waiting. Calling, crying, grabbing, gabbing. Nails scratching, tears slipping and slopping on their cheeks. In and out, up and off. Empty stretches. Pills, it must be pills. No days anymore. Just moments. Moments. Either the dreams with the reaching teeth and nails, or the waking with the worried voices and the smell of desperate preservation. Preservation at all costs. Is this living? Is this alive? Nothing has felt alive since the screaming.

It could be any time. Years and hours. No way of knowing now, too much is gone. There is no measure when this much is missing. Never really awake. Never really alive. Just moments, moment to moment, that disappear when they are done. Dreams that weigh more than reality. She may never be alive again. She may not even be alive now.

Carol awoke to the sound of beeping in the room. Vague, background beeping, of machines that needed to constantly remind the world that both they and their charges were still alive. She was one of them, so she supposed that meant she was alive after all. It did not feel like it. She had been asleep for so long, with only the occasional interruption of consciousness. It was hard to even say how long. She expected to fall straight to sleep again, and when it did not happen, she had to admit that this time might be for real. She might finally be waking up for good.

“Hello?” she called out. The word came out as a sort of gargle from deep in her throat, and sounded muffled, as if she was chewing. It was barely a word at all. With difficulty, she lifted her head from the hospital pillow, and tried to look around. Just a normal room, full of empty beds. The hospital was rarely busy. The couple of times she had been there before, she had seen that. It was usually just overzealous parents with snotty kids in tow, old people asking after flu shots, and the occasional accident. Thomas had brought her here once when she was just a kid, after she busted her knees falling out of a tree. That memory felt awfully close for some reason. Maybe it was the hospital smell.

No-one came. Carol lay back in the bed, stiff, and waited. As far as she could tell, she was the only person in the room. If there were other patients, they were well-hidden behind their curtains. Neat little houseplants out of her sight. She could have slept long enough for everyone else to get better in the meantime. That was the best way of looking at it. Though she could not help but think that, if that was the case, Thomas would be waiting for her to wake up. He must be getting something to drink. It had to be a drink. There was no way he would eat anything out of a hospital vending machine. No way in hell.

“Hello?” Carol called out again, the same numb slur turning her word into mush. At least it was loud this time. Finally, someone came. She heard feet across the floor, and then the doctor was with her. He stared down at her with curiosity, and she would have spat out something poisonous if she did not need his help.

“How are you feeling? Can you speak?” he asked. Had she not just called for him? Why did he feel the need to ask?

“Yeah… feeling…” It was still a struggle making her words sound right. And it hurt. Something about it hurt.

“Just relax,” the doctor said firmly. He went for her chart. There was no point, Carol thought, considering she was clearly one of the only patients staying in the hospital. He had to know everything about her already. She wondered if he just wanted the prop to hold in front of his face.

“Where…”

“Carol, please try not to talk for now,” he said, polite and firm again. He nudged his glasses up his nose and looked down at the chart. Just as she thought, it was a ploy to avoid eye contact. She might be dying after all. “I’m Dr. Johnson. I don’t know if you remember me.” She did, vaguely. They did not know each other well enough to stop and say hello, but she would have recognised him in the street. Even if such an encounter was unlikely. From what she knew, Dr. Ushah Johnson barely left the hospital, except to sleep. His house was on the way to her friend Becky’s, and their comings and goings in their cars had occasionally crossed paths. Carol could not think of a time she had seen the man out for a walk around town.

“Yeah,” she mumbled. Ushah nodded in acknowledgement and went on with a speech he had clearly been practicing for her waking up.

“You’ve been in and out of consciousness, Carol,” he said. Looking tick-tock from her to the chart, like clockwork. “They brought you in just about two weeks ago, and I don’t think you’ve been awake for more than twenty minutes at a time since. Nothing to worry about. You have a lot of healing to do, that’s all it is.” She knew that had to be the truth. She felt like she had just climbed out of a tumble dryer. “Do you… remember what happened?” Ushah looked at her with a concerned raised eyebrow. “Just nod.”

“No,” Carol answered. Every word still came out like her mouth was full of cotton, and it was beginning to bother her. She hated to be out of control of something so simple as her own mouth.

“All right,” Ushah sighed. “Well, the first thing I can tell you is that you’re going to be all right. You’re out of the woods now, Carol. So that is good news.” His fingers tapped idly against the clipboard clutching her chart, without his permission. “Now then. I’m sorry to tell you this, if you don’t remember, but you were attacked.”

“Nn…” Carol had wanted to say ‘no shit’, but it was too much of an effort. She could remember some of what had happened before. Enough. She knew who had put her in this hospital bed.

“The Raincoat Killer tried to kill you, Carol,” Ushah said. He said it gently, as if she did not already know. As if she had not known more about The Raincoat Killer than any of them. “But you don’t have to worry about a repeat performance. Agent Zach has ensured that won’t happen.” Carol jerked in place. Surely not? “Sher, uh, the killer is dead. He died resisting arrest, as far as I heard it. You’re completely safe.” Completely safe and hopeless. This was not how it was meant to happen. George could not be dead. Not shot by that fucking idiot. That dope from the FBI who always tried to start up a conversation with her, who thought that grilling her on the name of her bar was a friendly ice breaker. No. George was better than that. Miles and miles better than that.

“Wh… wha…” Carol tried. Ushah interrupted her as politely as he could.

“Try not to strain yourself,” he suggested. “You don’t want to break the stitches.” Stiches? What stitches? What? “Normally, we don’t put stiches in the tongue. They tend to heal well on their own. This time, however, seeing as it was almost fully severed… It was necessary to have a hope of saving it. You’re very lucky the attack was rushed.” None of these words made sense. Carol could not remember the moment of the attack itself. Not properly. No doubt that was the work of George’s tiny accomplices, the red seeds. They had a way of playing with your mind and your memory. She knew the other victims had lost their tongues. She had seen it happen to Anna. Had that happened to her? Just like that? “Agent Zach and Deputy Wyatt were able to get to the scene in a hurry. Them showing up so early probably scared off the killer while he was still, ah, active. You might owe them your life.” If Carol owed her life to those two, she did not want it. It was hard to think of anyone she hated more. It reminded her of something, though. A faint memory from that day. Something she could not quite place, but that she knew she had to remember. Where exactly had the two of them been hurrying _from?_ She tried to ask, but was shut down at the first gurgle.

“Wh…”

“Please, you don’t want to hurt yourself,” Ushah insisted. “It might be several days before you can talk properly. Or really at all.” He cleared his throat, unhappy handing her so much bad news at once.

“Thomas,” she managed. A lonely word that wanted to be a question. Ushah understood. He looked straight at the chart in his hands and avoided her eyes.

“I’m afraid your brother is dead,” he said quietly. “There was an altercation between him and Deputy Wyatt, that I’m not too clear on the details of. He was shot, and, uh, fell. Don’t think too hard about it right now. You need to focus on healing. There will be time for all this later.” Not good enough. He expected her to hear that her brother was dead and, what, just ignore it? Carol could not do that. She wanted him to be waiting in the reception room, trying to make the coffee machine give him something with milk. Getting more and more frustrated, and worried that he was taking too long. Thomas needed to be through there, worrying that she was going to wake up without him. Oh no. Was that not exactly what had just happened? Here she was, waking up without him.

“Can’t… can’t be…” Talking was still a losing battle, and she could feel the stiches now. Her tongue was all meat and mush, no functionality. The simplest words were a chore. Ushah stared at her with concern, and finally put the irritating clipboard down, surrendering his prop to actually focus on her.

“I’m sorry you have to hear this now,” Ushah said. She could tell he actually was sorry, or was a good liar, anyway. In a small town like Greenvale, the doctors were not used to losing people. Not young people. They certainly were not used to having to face their families afterwards. “All the arrangements can wait until you’re out of here. Just rest up. Try to eat some solid food. Don’t strain yourself.” He tried to give her a weak smile, and went on with a sense of sentimentality that Carol found offensive in a stranger. “You have been really lucky, Carol. You survived. I know it’s easy to focus on the bad right now, but you’ll be thankful you’re alive when you have time to think about it. There are some other girls who weren’t so lucky, right?”

“Leave,” she demanded, managing through force to almost spit it. Ushah backed up slightly.

“You need some space,” he agreed. “I’ll leave you alone for now. If you need anything, there’s a button.” Carol was not interested in paying attention to that. She glared at the doctor until he made himself scarce, and she was alone in the room once more.

Her head fell heavily back into the pillow with the weight of a brick. So, she was lucky to be alive. That was the story they were going with. The story she was meant to accept with glee and wonder. Nod along and agree with. And she did not. There was no way she could agree with that. Anna, Becky, and Diane had died. For nothing, it seemed. Their deaths were supposed to be for something bigger. Something important. They had not been called sacrifices for no reason, no, it was supposed to mean something. Now it was nothing. In the end, it could have been avoided. They died for nothing. All the fear, the blood, and the betrayals were pointless. They were not sacrifices, nothing grand. Just people who had so recently been alive, and who would never be alive again. Food for the worms. Probably already rotting in the ground, thanks to her. No mistaking, it was thanks to her.

It was supposed to be for George. He was going to be a god. _Their_ god. Anna and Becky would have gladly done it, if they had understood the situation better. They came along, didn’t they? They joined in? Of course they did. No-one could resist George when they saw him at his finest. He was half a god already. Anyone would have done anything to help him. Anna and Becky had been scared, but they agreed on some level. Diane was too stuck-up and self-obsessed to admit it, but some part of her recognised it, too. And Carol knew it better than anyone. Better than anyone. George was something different. He had the power in him all along, and they just had to help him realise it. It would have all been worth it. It would have been, if it had worked. Somehow, it did not. It must be like the doctor had tried to tell her, that that fucking FBI agent had rushed to the scene and got there in time to stop George from making his fourth and final sacrifice. Carol had not even believed that he could be stopped anymore, but the reality was in. He was done. George was just as dead and cold and over as the women he had killed. That was the worst part. It was all over. Everything was _over_. This had been her whole life for a long, long time, and now it had all evaporated along with the dew of their dying breaths. She was the survivor. The only survivor. Not even Thomas was left by her side.

That part was too much. Thomas should not even have been there. He should not have been involved. He was meant to be safe, survive, walk away from it all. Strutting off into the sunset. So was she. So was George. They were going to win. They were too strong, too good, to lose. God and his angels.

All in the dirt. She was the last one standing.

\- - -


	3. Home Sweet Home

**Chapter Three [Home Sweet Home]**

Zach put down the grocery bag he was cradling in one arm for long enough to unlock the front door. It swung open on the dark square of wooden floor that he had become quite familiar with over the past week or so. It was his floor now. At least, it was as long as he kept paying the rent.

After what had happened in the forest, Zach had eventually allowed himself to be led back to the car, and dropped off at the hotel. He had known, though, the whole time he was sitting in the backseat, that he would not be going through with his earlier plan. Seeing Emily in the trees, ethereal but almost alive, had changed his mind. He was not leaving town now. Not while she was out there, waiting for him. Zach had found the number for a realtor, quite possibly the only one in Greenvale, the second he was back in his hotel room. He had made the call right away. It only took a few days to set him up with a small rental property somewhere in the suburban dregs of town. The bed was crammed into the living room, making the whole house feel a lot like the hotel room he was replacing with it, but Zach did not care. Anything would do. The realtor had probably cheated him on the rent, and he had not cared about that either. The FBI had agreed to send him pay upfront for his recovery time. Hush money, he thought. He was yet to hand in an official report on this case, but he knew that his bosses already had an idea that it was going to need to be kept under wraps. The report would be an interesting challenge. He had been trying to write it for days, and getting nowhere. York usually handled that kind of thing. It was hard to sterilise the information for public consumption. He had seen things that did not fit into neat, checkable boxes on a sheet of office stationary. This case was outside the margins. Seeping out of the whole damn book.

He brought the groceries through to the kitchen and began packing them away. There was barely anything in the cupboards. One plate, one bowl, one spoon, one fork, one knife. That was the pattern. It was the same wherever they went. It was the same back home, too. Even if there had been two of them, they only had one mouth. One set of everything was more than enough when York and Zach spent their lives jetting around the country. And now, Zach thought, he finally matched. One fork, one knife, one Francis Morgan to use them. Only one.

The last thing in the bag was a lollipop, which Zach took out and unwrapped, balling the bag up in his hand at the same time. He tucked it into his mouth and tasted strawberries. He felt the need for a hint of sweetness. Once everything was away, he had to head out again. He had somewhere to be. This was just a drop off. With the lollipop still clicking against his teeth, Zach wandered back outside, as aimlessly as an unfettered spirit. It was night, just about, based on the inky colour of the sky. He did have to marvel at the sky over Greenvale. You could see every star hanging up there, and not a single bulb was out. One of the benefits to country life, he felt. He was not sure it was enough.

The car was waiting for him in front of the house. His car. The sturdiest thing he had ever had the pleasure of riding in. The fact that it was still going, even after their rather dramatic arrival in town, was testament to that. Getting behind the wheel, Zach could still not help but feel like it did not belong to him. Lately, he had been trying to treat it like inheritance. Everything they had had together, all the things they shared, he had now inherited. That was all. That was normal enough, the most normal way he could put it into words.

As he began the drive through the all-but-empty streets towards his inevitable destination, Zach found his mind creeping back to a scene in the hospital some days ago. He had heard it from one of the paperwork shufflers at the sheriff’s department. The few assistants there, the ones who ranked below Thomas had, were treating him as if he was the new sheriff. It put a bad taste in his mouth, but he knew it was just because they had no-one else. Somehow, the entire staff of actual, on-the-ground officers had been wiped out. Greenvale was at risk until new boots flocked in to replace them. For now, he was about all the town had. It did nothing for his recovery. No doubt it was also not ideal for the assistants trying to hold the department together, one of whom had had to be the person who told him that Carol MacLaine was still alive.

It was a funny bit of news, Zach had thought, after everything. Carol, he knew now, had been closest to George. Her and Thomas had been his accomplices in everything they did. A dark trio, operating on the other side of the chessboard. A king and his knights. It had backfired for them, though, had it not? Zach struggled not to add ‘York?’ onto the end of that thought. Things had exploded in Carol’s face, and she had wound up as the fourth victim in George’s bizarre murder game. Thomas was a casualty of himself, more than anything else. From what Zach could tell, he had suffered some kind of breakdown, brought on by the guilt of doing George’s dirty work. Or perhaps just from the strain of always being overlooked by the one he loved. What was it that Carol had described them as? Substitutes. Substitute lovers, and that reality had eventually smacked Thomas across the face. Zach was sure there were more factors in play than that, but the result remained the same. Thomas had snapped, and now he was dead. And Carol had come very close to the light herself.

It had been a shock to hear that she was recovering in the hospital. Especially seeing as he had been there, at the crime scene. The almost murder scene George had set up with her in mind. Zach had been sure he had watched her die. Carol had always seemed strong, the fire to Thomas’ water, so he supposed he could believe it. If any of them was going to survive, it would have been her.

He had gone to see her in the hospital. She had been unconscious the entire time, as he expected she still would be now. Ushah had assured him that she would wake up in time, but he was not so easily convinced. She did not look very lively. She looked like a dying girl, as if the machines surrounding her, and the nurses zipping in and out, were just delaying the inevitable. Carol was not looking much better than when he had seen her last, in that dark and grimy undercroft. The nurses had at least cleaned her up. You would not have guessed that she had practically vomited up her own tongue recently. Well, according to Ushah, that was an exaggeration. George had apparently not managed to chew through the whole muscle, leaving it just attached enough that, in the doctor’s words, ‘she had some hope of talking again when she woke up’. _Some hope_ sounded like it was all Carol had ever had. Zach had felt sorry for her since they had met, sensing that there was a lot going on with her that her bad attitude was covering up for. It was impossible to miss it, after that conversation about Anna. The wound was not just fresh, it was deep and real. Every conversation afterwards, during which Carol would snap at him and try to chew him out for the crime of asking too many questions, could not erase the genuine sorrow he had seen on her face that first day. It was carved into her expression as surely as the wounds were into Anna’s chest. Carol was in mourning. She just hated to show it.

York had not been quite as soft on her, but he had not disagreed with Zach. He had always just preferred to play against Carol’s contempt, having fun with it. York had always risen to people’s annoyance by being as much of himself as he could. Some people found it charming. Other people, if the slight scar that had graced York’s cheek up until his death was anything to go by, found him less charming. Zach did not feel that he, himself, was especially charming. Or personable. Or even friendly, really. He had a weakness for people, but he also had a weakness when it came to expressing it. No matter how much sympathy he wanted to share with someone, he was always at the disadvantage of having been silent for most of his life. Even if he had wanted to say something comforting to Carol, to try and alleviate some of her pain, he would never have found the words to get it done. And all of this was trivial now, anyway, because it was how he had felt before what had happened had happened.

Carol had, in what she, he, and Emily had assumed were the last few moments of her life, lashed out with a handful of red seeds, forcing them down Emily’s throat. The vicious act of petty revenge was not enough to do any lasting damage on its own. Carol was probably aware of that, even in her addled state. What she was not aware of, was that York would send Emily away with Kaysen, pleading for him to take her to the hospital. The rest was now history. Zach knew it was wrong to hold Kaysen’s actions against Carol. Carol had not murdered Emily. Carol had not murdered anyone. She had been there, though. She had been on the side-lines of all of these deaths, in ways that Zach was not entirely aware of, and she had been there for Emily’s, too. She had planted the seeds from which a thin tendril of fate had grown, creeping along the ground until it wrapped around Emily’s ankle and tripped her down towards her death. Carol had not killed Emily, but she was not innocent. Zach did not want to see her again until he could forget that he felt that way.

The drive was almost over now. The street ahead was dark, barring some bright spots cast by the gangly streetlights that always seemed to be placed too close to the edge of the road for his liking. A few more minutes, and he was turning onto the concrete outside the thick, metal gates that announced the entrance to the town’s graveyard. Another few, and he was halfway across the grass. He could not help but glance at the fresh, open graves that had recently been dug. They were covered for now, but very soon they would welcome their new owners. The new and permanent residents whose applications George had filled in for them. Even after seeing Emily in the woods, Zach had to remind himself that this was where she was ending up. Her spirit could waltz delicately above the ground, but her body was going to be trapped below, forever. The same was true of the others, of course. All of them cut off before their lives really had a chance to peak. Before they could be much of anything. Saplings squashed by a jackboot. Dirty secrets covered over with earth. He was not looking forward to the funerals. He never hung around to watch the funerals.

Zach went and stood near one of the open graves, peering downward. The tarp on top of it quivered weakly in the wind. He wondered if this one was going to be Emily’s. If this was where people would come to visit her. Lay flowers that she could never smell. He stood there and waited, and eventually he was not alone.

“How are you tonight?” he asked politely, without turning his head.

“You have… come back… again,” came the reply, in a voice that twitched like a nervous finger. Zach shot his companion a quick look. The grave keeper. Brian. Zach had met him during the case, though he had not been even tangentially involved. It would have been difficult for him to be, considering his handicap. After Zach had seen Emily, realised without a shadow of a doubt that he was not just imagining things, but that she had really been there, he had known it was time to dig deeper. He had to find a pathway that led towards her. Brian had always been haunted by a particular atmosphere. The few times that York had insisted on taking them to go and talk to the man, Zach had picked up on something eerie. With confirmation that the dead were indeed walking the earth, albeit not as aggressively as their favourite movies would have suggested, Zach knew who to go and address his questions to.

“I’m going to keep coming back, Brian,” Zach murmured, his eyes struggling to leave the grave that stretched out from his feet. “You’ll have to accept that.”

“I never… had m-many visitors… before…” Brian answered in explanation, and Zach could not make up his mind whether it was meant to come off as sceptical or friendly. Brian’s manner was difficult to read. Must be the lack of practice. Finally breaking the spell that the ground was working on him, he cleared his throat and turned full-bodied around to face the other man.

“You can help me again?” Zach asked. Brian considered him for a moment, with his tongue poking slightly between his teeth. Zach suspected that a long time spent with no-one around wrecked a person’s standards for acceptable body language. Eventually, Brian drew the dark tongue back into his mouth, and answered.

“I can…” Zach felt the weight lift from his shoulders. Every time since they had started, he was worried that Brian might turn him away. He did not know what he would do when that finally happened. He knew he could not stop. He was addicted. He needed this, even more than the nicotine habit York had cultivated, that he was trying to give up on.

Zach followed Brian through the dark graveyard, stumbling in many places at foot-catching roots and over broken pieces of stones that would never be fixed. In a small town like this, with only so many people capable of dying in it, many of the bodies encased in the dirt were probably decades-dead and long forgotten, with no families left who were willing to drag themselves all the way out to visit. They were abandoned. Zach was probably the only guest they had entertained all day. Sure, when the fresh graves were full, they would have their draw for a while. They would pull some people in from the town for a little while afterwards, but not forever. The graveyard would grow still again in time. Aside from him, that was. Zach would never be far away. He would keep coming back like this. As he had admitted to himself already, it was an addiction. The two of them, York and Zach, had always been firmly in the position of feeding their addictions.

After the first time, being able to see Emily again had been the only thing he cared about. It was finding her that was hard. He had had to enlist help. Brian, the not quite alive, not quite dead, never really part of the rest of the world, grave keeper had seemed like the obvious choice. The right one, too, it turned out. Brian was aware of what was hiding in the trees. He had not tried to lie about it when asked directly. It actually seemed like he was happy to have someone to talk to. Someone to share the secret with. Ghosts in the wood. The perfect material to build a friendship out of. Zach had gone along with it to a point. He was willing to play nice and feed handfuls of company to the starving man so long as he got what he wanted. What he needed. Brian had been willing enough to show him the path forward.

“Tonight… over here…” Brian called out. He had managed to get a way ahead of Zach. It was hard to tell just where he was in the dark. He moved soundlessly, as if he did not possess the weight required to interrupt anything in his path. Zach hurried to catch up. They were by the edge of the treeline now. He did not know how Brian found the right places to look, each and every time, but he always did. Maybe he was in a unique position to sense them. No matter how he did it, Zach did not care. It did not matter. When he was close, he could see that Brian was facing a small gap between two trunks. A space that led inward. He was waiting for Zach to go through it. Zach did, creeping nervously into the embrace of the woods, smelling the pine all around him. He crept forward, buffeted gently onward by pillars of bark, until he saw what he had come for.

She must be glowing, because she stood out so clearly even in the darkness. Her pale skin and light hair illuminated the space around her, and the red of her dress was like a scarf over a lampshade. Here she was again. Every time, he was worried it was the end. That the miracle would run out of power, and he would one day find himself just a man, lonely, trapped in a dark wood without a hand to reach for. Not yet. It was not over yet.

“Emily,” he breathed, and watched as she smiled in response to her name. The simple expression made him dizzy. It was intoxicating. It tempted him into falling over, but he steadied himself against a tree with one hand.

“Zach,” she said, her voice so familiar that it stung. “Here you are again.”

 - - -


	4. Silence

**Chapter Four [Silence]**

The Galaxy of Terror was empty. At this time of night, the place was normally full of softly shifting bodies, craning their necks to the sound of the music, as Carol moved across the stage. Most of the tables would have at least someone sitting down at them, nursing a drink, marvelling at her performance. Thomas, as always, would be behind the bar. Cleaning glasses and taking orders. Looking over at her with a supportive smile, and enjoying the music as much as anyone. He liked to listen to the finished pieces, having always heard the songs first in the early, clumsy stages of their birth, and then eagerly having given notes throughout their adolescences. He always said how much he liked hearing how well they turned out, when they finally came seeping out of the microphone, backed by the piano. He loved hearing her sing. That had been true ever since the only singing she did was loud and abrasive renditions of pop songs, going along with the radio or the record player, when she was about five years old. There were a lot of warm memories back there, in the past. A lifetime of songs. But Carol could not sing anymore.

This was her first day out of the hospital, an exodus she had secured for herself as soon as physically possible. They had not let her walk out of the ward the moment she got her bearings, as she would have liked, but they could not keep her beyond the next morning. She had come straight here. The idea of going back to her dirty apartment to wallow did not appeal. She had entered her bar, and crossed the floor, almost convinced for the moments it took that she was done up in her red dress and heels, like always. At the hospital, they had refused to let her leave in heels. She was wearing flat shoes for the first time since high school. Apparently, her body did not need the extra strain that heels would force it to endure. The red dress was out of the question as well, lying as it was somewhere in an evidence bag, soaking in her shed blood. At the thought, Carol brought a hand passingly over her chest, knowing she was hovering over the bandages that were spun underneath her clothes. Bandages covering up the gash George had dug into her chest. Poorly, though. He had apparently only really grazed her. The wound was shallow, and already close to healed from her time unconscious. There would be a scar, probably, to alert the world of her failed vivisection, but that would be all. It was nothing like the scars embedded permanently in the other girls’ bodies. Anna, Becky, and even Diane. They all had their wounds engraved like wedding bands into their chests. George’s parting gifts.

When Carol had reached the microphone in the empty room, she had put her lips close to it and shut her eyes. She had barely said anything out loud at the hospital. Just the odd word, sputtering from her chapped lips. Standing on her usual spot, centre stage, she opened those lips, imagining them warm and red with colour, and tried. The song did not come. That last song, the one that hinted at their future, at where George would lead them all, struggled in the back of her throat. It rose from her lungs only to skitter across the stiches that circled her tongue. She gurgled and groaned, and that was all. Carol could manage the odd word, but she could not sing anymore. She was a singer without a voice.

With that discovery out of the way, Carol stalked over to the bar itself. She sat herself down on top of it, leaned her legs over the wood, and hung them down the other side. Something she had not done for quite a while. Thomas always complained about this reckless habit of hers, claiming that shoe scuffs on the bar top were another thing for him to worry about. Another thing to clean before they opened. Carol wished he was here now, so she could tell him not to waste time on worry. Even if she opened the bar, flung the doors out wide, there would be no customers tonight. Not one.

Did everyone in Greenvale know? Maybe. If the case was resolved then she had to assume that they did. The FBI bastard would have told people. He would have shared his revelation with the greedy, selfish glee of a workplace gossip. He had always bothered her. His idle chitchat had been a cover for the suspicion he had no doubt always felt for her. Carol wondered if it had been her or Thomas who had given the game away. Her bad attitude, her refusal to cosy up and answer questions, or Thomas’ nerves. His constant, paper-thin resistance to breaking down, that had lingered since the start of this affair. Since Anna died, and maybe, she thought now, before. From when the plan had first begun to form in George’s mind. It could even have been George himself who gave them away to the FBI. He was caught in the end, after all. Agent Zach may have seen his guilt first, and noticed Carol and her brother standing in his shadow second. Whichever way around it had been, what mattered now, the only thing that did, was that it was out. It was public. Carol would not be in the least surprised if every single mouth in Greenvale had been covered in shock as its ears heard her secret, only to turn and spill it out to the next person in line, in the very next second. George may have been the man in charge, but with him gone, she knew she would become the scapegoat for everything that had happened. The specks of blood on her hands had been drenched by a second torrent. George’s blood was her blood. His guilt was her guilt. That was the price she paid for being the last survivor.

Did she deserve it? Maybe. Probably, in fact. She participated. She planned. She was part of it. The second in command. Thomas had been the third wheel. Never willing to be as involved as she was, but doing it for George. He had been doing it for George, had he not? Not for her. If he had done any of it for her, that would be unbearable. It had to have been for George. That was why she was there, and Thomas and she, in this way, had been on exactly the same page. Not just the page, but the sentence. The syllable. They had loved him in the same way, and with the same intensity. If they had not, then one of them would have seen it. The one who loved the least would have stepped away. Surely. The only reason they both stayed, in the way that they did, running around on the hamster wheel, chasing each other’s tails, was because for both of them it was just too much. Too much to let go of. Thomas was there because he wanted to be, because he wanted to be with George. Not for Carol’s sake at all, she told herself. Though, even as the thought crossed her mind, she had to admit it had not been true of everyone.

Anna Graham. Carol knew her from high school. Technically, from before that. Carol was two years older than Anna, but in a small town like Greenvale, where kids were not as common as they were in the city, two years was not that big a difference. They always inevitably found themselves in the same social circles. Pushed together by parents, or by mutual friends. And, more than most, girls like Anna and Carol always ended up pushed together. Pretty girls who were expected to grow up a certain way, do certain things. Want certain things. Carol, for her part, had not thought that they had much in common. Anna was the all-American teen idol. The prom queen prototype. Carol had not wanted the same life that Anna had for herself. She wanted to be the dark reflection, and she had succeeded. They were both pretty girls, for sure, and superficially similar. But only one of them belonged in the daylight. Anna was the one whose public face was her only face. Nothing but air inside her skull. In fact, Anna was essentially a soap bubble, floating high into the air. Shiny and soft and… fragile.

Despite their differences, Anna had always liked Carol. Too much, Carol thought. Too much for her own good, certainly. Spending time with Carol meant that that squeaky-clean image of Anna’s was soon covered with dirty fingerprints. Tracks of mud left behind in her golden hair. Stains that Carol did not like to look at too hard. Anna, it seemed, had grown tired of the light. The way that people do, when they do not have enough experience to be afraid of the dark. She idolised Carol, imagining that she had access to something that Anna herself did not. Something cool and secret. She followed Carol around, tagging along behind her, looking for something more. And damn, she got it, all right. She got far more than she bargained for, and she had to go and bring her friend along for the ride.

Both of them had looked so damn out of place in Carol’s world. Anna and Becky belonged in a closed off classroom, discussing the homecoming arrangements. Sitting at home, watching movies and doing homework. Getting into arguments with other teenagers about whatever stupid bullshit teenagers that had not lived Carol’s life argued about. They were fools for following her at all, begging for more. Hounding her for entertainment and excitement. Like she had any idea how to fill that void. Carol would have turned them away. Should have turned them away. She really should have, and might have, but there was that day, when it all became too late.

The two of them had been in her bar, before opening hours. Becky had mostly kept to herself. Naturally a bit quieter than Anna, and still uncertain about being there at all. Carol had been tempted to bark at her, just to get a reaction. Make her jump. Funny, but not really worth it if the story became gossip. Anna had been talking incessantly, badgering Carol as she refilled liquor bottles behind the bar. Going on and on about the car she was hoping she might get for a graduation present at the end of the year. Knowing her mother, it seemed unlikely. Spare money in that house never seemed to find its way into a college fund, for some reason. Carol had listened, mostly because she was preoccupied with work, and partly because she had no desire for Anna to turn on the waterworks. She was not paying that much attention, letting Anna’s words slowly enter her orbit, while she focused on the bottles. Then, the door had opened, and she had turned to see George standing there, blocking out the daylight.

He had bluffed his way out of the situation well enough. As the local sheriff, he was there to inspect the liquor licence. It was that time of the year. Anna and Becky had nodded, wide-eyed, and accepted the story without a second thought. When, within a few moments, George was gone, Anna went back to talking, and Becky went back to picking at her hair. Carol had sensed something, though, in those few moments, while George was in the bar. She must have caught a look in his eye. A fleeting thought. Sure enough, later that night, when good girls like Anna and Becky were in bed, George told Carol what he wanted. And she, as he had known she would, set about giving it to him.

The secret club that she and Thomas had designed, and furnished, and formed, in the belly of her bar, had been an instant success. Anna had loved it, taken in as she was by the red world and the secrecy. At least, she had seemed to be. Carol did not know if the slight hesitation she thought she saw cross Anna’s pretty face was real, or not. Or if it was just a slight, natural hesitation at being on the threshold of something new. Like Carol told herself it was afterwards. Becky had been slower to join in, bringing up mentions of her boyfriend, and how he might feel about her coming down to play in the basement, but Anna had been a valuable hand in convincing her. None of it mattered after they gave them the seeds. Once the seeds came into the mix, Anna and Becky were lost to the game. Drowning like flies in Carol’s cocktail glass. They were part of it. There was no turning back. The path behind them was already being rubbed out, and from the first moment that Anna stood giggling and stroking the red velvet of the curtain on the wall, her fate was sealed. She was wrapped up in that curtain, and everything else, long before dawn on the day she died. It was inevitable. Everything that had happened had been inevitable.

So why exactly did Carol still feel shocked? Because they were meant to win, she told herself. George was supposed to, of all of them, survive. To do better than survive. George was meant to have become a god by now. Whatever that entailed. Carol had never been able to picture it properly. Whenever she tried, she just found herself, in her mind, staring up at George with her wrist on her forehead, fingers crossing her eyeline, blinded by the light. Struggling to look. Beyond carrying out the plan, the sacrifices, and the success, there had never been much discussion. George became a god. Then what? She did not know. Based on what he had done, his attempt to make her the fourth and final sacrifice, Carol supposed she was not meant to know. She was not part of that plan, of the aftermath. Just the build-up. A piece and not a player, in the end. George might not have known where it was going himself. He wanted the power. He wanted to _be_ the power. It was possible he had not thought what he was going to do with it once he had it. So, there was that. More than enough reason to be shell-shocked by how things had turned out. But then, there was also Thomas.

Thomas was not meant to die. No matter how many times she went through it in her head, he was not meant to die. He should be alive right now. Even if she had died, even if George had picked her as a sacrifice, Thomas was meant to survive. Bitterly, Carol thought that _of course_ he was meant to live. He was supposed to be the fake out. The bone thrown for the FBI to chase after. She had not known that from the very beginning, but it had become clear, and it was never clearer than when she had realised, after the fact, that George had rushed through her attempted murder to make it seem that Thomas could still have done it. She suspected he had heard about Thomas’ fate over the police radio. If the others knew, then George would have, as well. He tried to salvage his alibi before Thomas’ body was cold. He had rushed the final sacrifice and ruined it. His work was too sloppy, the wounds he left were too shallow. It was a wasted effort. The only wound that truly ran deep, the one that even endless unconscious weeks in the hospital could never manage to heal, was the one that Thomas’ death had left on her.

Carol looked out at the empty bar. The unfilled tables. The abandoned register. The out of use microphone. She pushed her tongue against the roof of her mouth and felt the stitches bumping against the ceiling. She may not be able to sing now. George may have silenced her. But it was Thomas’ voice that she was really missing. It was his absence that made the bar feel so empty today.

 - - -


	5. Funeral March

**Chapter Five [Funeral March]**

Appropriately enough, it was raining when Zach left the house. Just spitting, thankfully, otherwise habit might overtake the town and today’s events would have to be put off for another day. This was not the sort of thing you could easily put off for later. He sighed quietly to himself, patting down his suit. York’s suit. He had taken to leaving the jacket off, as it was summer after all, but for today he felt he needed the full thing. The dark grey that York especially favoured for work, though with a different tie. The usual one, with the red sliced through with stripes, felt inappropriate. He had a black check one in the bottom of the case that was a better fit for this. He adjusted it now, glancing at his white knuckles as he tightened it up to his throat. He checked the pocket of his jacket to make sure he had remembered the nicotine patches. It was going to be a long day, and he suspected he might need a couple of them. Smoking was such an unhealthy habit. York really could have cut back earlier. At the rate he used to smoke, it could almost have been them heading into the ground today.

Anna’s mother, Sallie Graham, had personally invited him to the funeral. Well, in the sense that Richard Dunn had tracked him down with the invitation, saying it came straight from Sallie’s mouth. Sallie herself was still not in much of a state to leave the house. Not unless it was to go straight over to see Richard. At least they had each other through this. Tragedy was often only made bearable by having someone’s hand nearby, ready to reach for yours.

Trying to push the thought out of his head, Zach went to the car, ready to make his way over to the graveyard. There was no need for the map he had carried when he first arrived in Greenvale. He felt like he had the route there memorised by now. The rain was a vague sizzle on the windscreen by the time he pulled up in amongst all the other familiar cars. He climbed out of the car, ducked his head to avoid eye contact, and walked forward.

A crowd was gathered around one of the open, empty graves, bored into the damp earth. Anna had been a popular girl. The prom queen, he was sure he remembered. There were people standing on the outside of the huddle who must have been classmates of hers. Zach could not help but wonder how many of them really knew a single true thing about her. If there was one thing that had been proven during his time here, it was that Anna was not who she appeared to be on the surface. None of them had been. He tried to find a neutral spot to stand. Not too close, at the risk of invading the inner circle of mourners, but not so far away that he ended up looking like he felt forced to be there. He may never have met Anna, but he had come to like the people close to her. He was doing this for their sake.

Scanning for familiar faces, Zach noticed Lilly Ingram standing to the side of the grave. She seemed calmly upset, holding back, and Zach thought he remembered Sallie mention to them that Lilly had been like a second mother to her daughter. Whatever that meant in practice. Sallie herself was at the head of the grave, wearing a dress and not her housecoat for once, and clinging desperately onto Richard’s arm like he was the last rock at sea. Quint stood silently with them, holding her other hand. The only other person that Zach recognised was Olivia Cormack from the diner, who was by herself. Anna had worked there, and Zach would have been surprised that Olivia’s husband Nick was not with her, if he had not met him. Nick was not the sociable sort, or even the friendly or considerate sort. Clearly the death of his teenage waitress did not warrant an appearance from him. No doubt there were some eggs that needed frying.

Zach went and stood beside Olivia, who was already an outsider to the group. Everyone else had at least someone to talk to, from the look of things. She smiled nervously up at him, as if he had surprised her. He forced a weak smile back at her in response. It was hard to tell what the proper protocol was for a funeral, whether or not smiling was offensive to Anna’s memory in some way. He hoped not. He had always pictured her as a smiling girl, based on what people had told him about her. And the occasional visions of her running ahead of him, calling for him to follow, like a red leaf stuck to the breeze.

“It’s so sad…” Olivia murmured, careful not to speak loudly enough to disturb anyone. “I know I’ve already said that. Hasn’t everyone? It feels more real when you’re here. The actual day.” She gave off a soft sigh. Zach was tempted to put his arm around her, but only because he thought it might be what people did. Knowing his luck, it would have been the wrong thing, and she would shudder away from him, exposing him for the outsider he was. He must never let himself forget. Even though the people here, the people back at work, people, thought they knew him, they had only ever known York. He had been a bystander, a whisper, and nothing more. He did not know how to approach them.

“It does,” Zach muttered, deciding it was safe and vague. Olivia nodded to herself, and the two of them lapsed into silence. Zach looked out, trying to avoid sweeping his eyes too thoroughly over the trees that surrounded the graveyard, and turned his head towards the family. Sallie was not coping well. Anyone could have determined that, it hardly took years of profiling experience. The woman was hunching now, struggling to stay upright, as the two Dunns attempted to support her on either side. She had become like a liquid, suddenly and spontaneously freed from its bottle by a trick of magic, desperate to drain into the grass. He did not envy Richard, or even Quint, having to take care of her. They had their work cut out for them.

As Zach stood and stared, trying to be both separate and present, as he had been for most of his life, the coffin slowly approached, limping across the grass on four legs. It would have occurred to him that it was odd for Richard not to be one of the men carrying it, if he did not see how desperately Sallie needed him holding onto her. If he vanished, for even a second, she might just collapse straight into the grave with Anna. The four of them were unrecognisable to him. No-one he had met in Greenvale. Presumably part of the life Anna had lived before her name had ever entered his head.

The coffin was lowered slowly into the ground, and the droning voice of someone in the crowd informed them all that Anna had been a beautiful girl whose bubbly spirit would be greatly missed. It made Zach shiver a little, to think that someone could die so young, having done so little in life, that the only thing people could think to say about them at their funeral was that they were pretty. He seemed to be the only person who objected, unless for some reason every other sad face staring into the grave happened to be hiding the same thought. Other things were said, but he had tuned it out already, knowing they were talking about someone he had never met, and never would. He waited and watched as Sallie, with Richard acting as crutch, stepped forward and dropped a handful of dirt on top of the coffin. Others did the same. The ritual was carefully followed. The crowd began to break, scatter, and split in two. Half heading back to their cars while the others stayed, trudging on towards the next empty graves, awaiting the second funeral of the day.

It made Zach uncomfortable that there was so much waiting. The whole time, he was frightened that someone would try and strike up a conversation with him, and he would have to awkwardly admit that he was neither friend nor relative. He was the person whose failure and feet-dragging had put Becky Ames in the funeral queue.

When the people began to regroup, and slowly form into a cohesive circle around the second grave, Zach made sure that he was part of it. Some of them had hung around from the first funeral. Most of the high school aged people were still there, and a few of the others. Lilly was still hanging around, now joined by her husband, Keith. Zach recalled that Becky had worked for them, in their store. The look on Keith’s face, the crumpled, exhausted kind of regret, was a display of genuine emotion that almost made Zach feel envious. He only wished he could be as close to his own heart as Keith was to his. Quint was still there, of course. His father had had to take Sallie home as soon as Anna’s funeral was over. There was no chance of keeping her on her feet any longer, but Quint had inevitably stayed behind. Becky had been his girlfriend.

Zach stared at Quint, aware that he was doing it, but unable to stop. He was darkly fascinated. Quint was hiding nothing. Every twenty seconds, like clockwork, he reached up and rubbed at his eyes, trying desperately to somehow stay the bubbling tears. He had no chance. The tears, with the amount he was crying, were endless. They poured as surely and steadily as the waterfall on the edge of town. He was a fountain of pain. And Zach could not get past it. It did not escape him that he and Quint were in the same position. They had both lost the person they loved, to the same villains. They were not on quite the same footing, however. Quint was able to mourn publicly. Everyone knew that Becky had been his girlfriend. His loss was public knowledge. Zach’s was not. The things that had happened between him and Emily were buttoned up, shrouded with the same cloth that had to hide half of what had happened. The relationship between him and Emily, whatever it had been, was part of the cover up. That was not the only thing that unbalanced his and Quint’s commonality, and he knew it. Unlike Zach, Quint would never see Becky again. Zach knew something he did not. Would he tell him if he could? If it was possible to explain? No, he decided. It was better that Quint try and move on. It was the best thing for him, especially today.

Forcing his gaze away from Quint, Zach noticed Polly Oxford standing, bent over, to the side of everyone. He had liked Polly since first meeting her as he and York checked into the hotel. She was sweet and, most important of all, always in possession of a hot cup of coffee. He was aware that her frequent inability to hear what people were saying had frustrated York, but he considered himself more patient. He went to stand with her, receiving a small smile and a pat on the back of the hand for his trouble. No words were exchanged. What would be the point?

Suddenly, with a low, droning wail, that drew the eyes of everyone standing by, a woman pushed free of the revellers and laid herself on her knees before the gravesite. She was quickly swarmed by sympathetic hangers-on and submerged back into the mass, her dramatic display of emotion forcibly forgotten. Even without seeing her reaction, it was obvious from the familiar, flat locks of brown hair and the perpetually sad-shaped face that this was the mother. How terrible it must be, to lose both of her daughters in one week. Becky and Diane were about to say their final goodbyes. Despite her many comforters, Zach could still clearly hear the sound of the Ames sisters’ mother wailing in the middle of the crowd. The shiver that the sound cut through him could hopefully be passed off as the result of the cold.

The coffins were brought forward. Although family members clearly made up most of the pallbearers this time, Zach did not fail to spot that Quint had taken up one of the corners for Becky. Staring at him, struggling under the too-heavy weight of the gaudy, aggressively expensive coffin that was flattening his shoulder, Zach was struck by the strength of his persistent loyalty to his dead girlfriend. It would be a long time before Quint moved on, he decided. A far too long time, for someone that young.

The speech was longer this time, as they were burying two for one. Becky’s eulogy came first, just as her death had. Her mother’s cries, eventually joined by Quint’s when he reached a breaking point, spattered interruptions throughout the recital. With the promise that no-one’s eyes were on him, Zach took a moment to look around the crowd. He recognised a selection of redheads which, presumably, made up the ranks of the extended Ames family. An odd family, no doubt. It seemed they had come from all over to ensure that their fallen members had the largest funeral of the pack. Though, aside from the weeping mother, none of them appeared to be crying. Maybe they were too scattered, and despite the family connection, none of them knew either Becky or Diane much, personally. He hoped that was it. Any other possibility was too dark to consider on the day of the funeral itself. Still, it was hard not to look at the variety show of crisp, new, designer black raincoats and wonder if they were just here for appearances’ sake.

Inevitably, Zach found himself returning to a thought he had first had shortly after they had had to fish Becky’s body out of her bathtub. Where had her mother been then? Diane had implied that their father was dead, and based on attendance today, he had to assume that was the case. Their mother, though, here in all her melancholy glory, screaming up a storm of grief, was, in contrast, very much alive. Her raw pain at the death of her daughters was as alive as it was possible to feel, and a sharp suffering of opposition to the people in the ground. If only she had shown some of this passion earlier, and been around when they needed her. Zach wondered if they would still be burying Becky today if her mother had been watching over her at home when the Raincoat Killer had been lurking outside the window, or even before, when Becky was first lured into his game. Perhaps not. He hoped wherever she had been jetting off to, on the back of her no doubt endless bank account, had been worth it. Meanly, really. Admittedly, it was a harsh thought. She could not have known what was happening. Teenagers never wanted to open up to their parents about their problems. At least, he had to assume that was the case. Even if he had wanted to, the opportunity had never been there for him.

The talking parts for the second and third funerals began to wind down, and some of the crowd made as quick an exit as it was physically possible to make, fleeing like bullets from a gun. He told himself it was just that with all the naked displays of grief, they would find it too hard to stay. Not that they had flights booked that they would rather not miss. For his own part, he lingered. He did not feel an aversion to cemeteries anymore, or at least not this one in particular. This one had too many good secrets hiding in the woodwork to become oversaturated with sadness. It seemed that there were not many people who shared his feeling. He watched as Quint walked, alone, head down, along the path to the exit, walking straight past the Ames’ mother without saying a word to her. For her own part, she was surrounded by sympathisers. He saw Lilly and Polly both offering hands for her shoulders, with words for her different daughters. The mother was crying into a handkerchief, wiping her eyes routinely and nodding like a clock. Tick tock, head bobbing, as the outpouring of sympathy kept flowing. Again, it crossed his mind that she could have been here in Greenvale to share her daughters’ final days, if she had wanted. She could have come back when her youngest daughter’s best friend was murdered, and especially after that same daughter was murdered too, to be there for her other child. There were too many ‘could have’s in this case. Little things that would have changed everything if a minute played out differently, or faster. It would make a person insane to try and think about them all. Even one was enough to take root and destroy someone. One minute different. One minute faster. It was pointless. It was already over.

Zach left after everyone else, his eyes darting off towards the woods every few seconds, but his feet not following. It would not be right, not today. Today he just had to go home. There would be many more chances, to go after what was waiting in those woods for him. After watching their bodies being slowly, sorrowfully buried in the earth, Zach did not want to run the risk of having to face any of the dead girls today. The whiplash would be too much, so much that even Emily could not fully comfort him. Besides. There was another busy day coming tomorrow.

It was raining far harder when Zach left the house the next day, and he drove past a mass of shuttered shop windows on the way to the graveyard this time. Everyone in town could easily be asleep. Not that it would matter. He had a feeling today would be a lot quieter than yesterday. Far more reserved than the funerals of three of Greenvale’s most popular young women.

Stepping out of the car at the other end, looking through the looming metal gates, Zach found himself thinking about Thomas.  Though naturally, today was not Thomas’ day. Seeing as his sister had survived, and his funeral was to be dictated at her discretion, he would likely not be buried for a while yet. With everything that had happened, and healing to do on top, Zach imagined that Carol had not much been in the mind for funeral planning. It must be shock enough to adjust to the fact that she was still alive, let alone the fact that Thomas was not. Would he get an invitation when she did finally get around to making a plan? He had been friends with Thomas. He had actually been starting to grow quite fond of the gentle and sensitive man, of his jumpy, nervous mannerisms, and warm, homey cooking. He would have called them friends. Well, York and Thomas were friends. It might be a rich assumption for Zach to claim the same. _He_ had seen Thomas as a friend. Thomas would not even know who he was, if they could ever really speak. That did not do much to desensitise Zach to his death, however. The invite would be welcomed, if Carol did decide to send it. Though he very much doubted that she would.

There was no-one waiting by the grave this time. Zach was early. He should have known that the funeral attendees would not be here yet. They would be waiting for the perfect time to appear. Sure enough, moments before the funeral was scheduled to start, Zach saw the limousine pull up in the parking lot, and the doors open to reveal Harry Stewart. He came, assisted by Michael, up the hill towards Zach’s waiting party of one. It would just be the three of them today, Zach thought, reaching instinctively for a cigarette and immediately remembering he did not have any with him. No-one else was going to brave the rain to mourn George Woodman.

“Ah, Zach, I wondered if I would see you here today,” Harry said, once the two of them were face to face. “I should thank you for coming out for my son.” The old man had assumed a friendly tone, in his crackling, strained voice, and it was not something Zach much appreciated. Just because they happened to share a few secrets, something which Zach had not chosen to happen, did not make them friends. It had probably been better when Harry forced his assistant to speak for him. At least then there had been a buffer, and Michael, as was to be expected from someone who was currently looking pointedly away from the conversation, was effervescent with that kind of strained politeness that never demanded more social contact than an occasional handshake. Harry, on the other hand, now that he was released from his paranoid attachment to the gasmask he had worn for God knows how many years, had a need to invest in every social interaction. He left a kind of film on you after you were done talking, a reminder that this was not just conversation, but business. He always wanted something, or already felt he had something, and wanted to remind you of it. Harry had decided that he had some kind of a confidence with Zach, built on their shared knowledge of certain secrets, and Zach did not like it one bit. Not least because he was hoping to keep certain secrets about what he was still doing in Greenvale to himself, and he suspected that Harry would find a way of figuring out the truth if he had any sniff of what was going on.

“It seemed right,” Zach said flatly. “George… we worked together.” On this case, he added internally. On the same side, and the opposite side. One after the other.

“I am a little surprised to see you still in town, Zach,” Harry went on, face clouding, barbs prickling at the edges of his voice. “As glad as I am to see you here for George’s sake, I did think you would have left by now. A busy man, such as yourself. With your work completed, I cannot imagine what there is for you here.”

“I’ve had some recovering to do, that’s all,” Zach explained, struggling against the urge to defend himself. He tried to act neutral, uninvolved. Harry was not to find out what was keeping him here. The man would take any whisper and tug the thread until the truth unwound into his hands. It was not his to discover. The secret in the woods was Zach’s, and Zach’s alone.

“Yes, I suppose you must be the worse for wear after your dramatic confrontation with your Raincoat Killer,” Harry said, more barbed than ever. Zach had no response. The implication was clear, the reality known to them both. Zach had been the one to pull the trigger against George. He had, all excuses aside, ended his life. The life of Harry’s son, whose funeral they were all here to attend. Nothing was going to deplete that awkwardness, not even the fact that it had been a necessary action in self-defence. Nor the fact that George had been the town’s local serial killer, as the lack of other funeral attendees would testify to. If anything, it made it worse. There were no ground rules for this kind of situation. Bearing that in mind, Zach gave a useless nod, and went to stand at the far end of the grave. Harry sat opposite, the hole in between him and Zach, and Michael unfurled an umbrella over himself and Harry. For a long few minutes, they were left staring at one another, emotionlessly and wordlessly. Despite it, Zach still felt more comfortable here than he had yesterday. At least no-one was crying. No-one was going to try and talk to him.

Eventually, after what felt like hours, but was probably closer to four minutes, the hearse carrying George’s body arrived down the hill. Zach wondered who Harry had managed to rope into carrying it. No-one in Greenvale would want to touch the Raincoat Killer’s coffin with gloves on. Sure enough, he did not recognise any of the pall bearers’ faces, and was left with the suspicion that Harry might have simply hired them from out of town. Appropriate, really. They knew George about as well as anyone else here had. The coffin was lowered into the ground with a thick thud. Heavy to the end. No-one stepped forward to lay any earth over it, and Harry waved the men who had brought George’s body away, leaving the three of them alone again. The rain continued to torrent, looking as though it might flood the grave, though draining just enough each time to leave it as no more than a perpetual threat. Zach watched Harry as he looked down into the grave, at the last remains of his only son. His only family, Zach realised. The end of the Woodmans. While he watched, Michael reached out, hesitatingly, and rested a hand not on Harry’s chair, but on his shoulder. Harry made no reaction. A shame, Zach thought. Michael was all he had now. Him, and a very empty house.

“I could have known him far better,” Harry said suddenly, though the regret was so muttered it could only technically be considered voiced. His eyes were still pointed into the grave, and the sound of the rain gunshoting off the coffin lid did a lot to mask what he was saying. Even with the purple fog purged from the ground, the rain was still a barrier between Harry and the rest of the world. It had to be how he liked it. Zach thought that was it, as the moment’s reflection dragged on and on, but Harry did continue, without letting his focus break from the grave where his son was waiting to be buried. “So much. Far, far better.” At least, that was what Zach thought he said. It was hard to make out.

Signalled by some kind of silent cue, Michael walked to the back of Harry’s chair and turned him away from the grave, leading the two of them back towards the path, and out of the graveyard. Zach let them go. George’s funeral, limp and lifeless as it had been, was over. It was all the man could expect, after what he had done. Zach took a moment to look down at the coffin himself, remembering the last time they had seen each other, at the end of George’s life.

“You brought it on yourself, George,” he said quietly. “You should have asked for help, a long time ago. Maybe everyone would be happier if you had.” Unwelcome eulogy out of the way, Zach turned towards the shack and the little shelter its overhanging roof would provide from the rain. He was not completely devoid of sympathy for George. He had more than York had done, at the end. Not much, though. Ultimately, people made their own choices in life, and it was hard to imagine making worse choices than the ones George had settled on. The sympathy he felt was more for the little boy that, no doubt, was also the person Harry had been mourning. That boy had shown up in flashes in some of the conversations George had lured him into, when he had found the need to confide in York about why he was the way he was, maybe wanting to explain just in case he was caught in the end. The helpless, hurting boy had appeared then, but he had been dead long before the man he had grown into had ended up in the ground. Harry was mourning an old ghost. No-one left alive was mourning the person that was being buried in that grave.

Zach stood, tucked in against the wooden wall, enjoying a moment out of the rain. He wanted to leave the grave keeper alone to fill in the hole in peace, lest they meet eyes. The idea of talking to Brian today, before the final event in the calendar was out of the way, was too much to consider. Zach had a hard enough time making peace with it on his own, let alone with other people who knew the truth getting involved. How he was going to stand by later that afternoon, and watch as they buried Emily, knowing that she was still alive, that some part of her was still so completely real, he could not imagine. He had had days to try and figure it out, and he was still utterly lost. Hopefully these last few hours before the final funeral would turn out to be enough to prepare himself.

When the time came, as the rain calmed down, and the people began to slowly trickle over like ink droplets in their black suits, Zach went to join them without a word, hoping to blend in with the crowd. Not an easy task, with the poor turnout. He recognised a few of the paper pushers from the sheriff’s department, people who knew Emily from work, but who had had so little involvement in anything they had done, that he had never spoken to them. Thomas had been the main assistant. Zach was still at a loss as to what any of those others did. Some of them were still hanging back by the gates, and he supposed that those ones were waiting for the hearse to arrive, for the coffin to come. Aside from those few people who had come from the office out of a sense of duty, attendance barely existed. Zach turned his head from side to side with his heart sinking, for Emily’s sake.

It made it seem like she had always been lonely. The lack of people here to grieve for her was the final sign of a sheltered existence. When he thought about it, Emily had never really been the social type. Even ignoring the slightly awkward, unpractised way that she navigated social interactions, a tendency he recognised, which he would admit had drawn him to her more than it should have, Emily had never mentioned many friends. She was always by herself. Spending the evening alone, cooking alone, eating alone. The only people she ever seemed to interact with at all, outside of the emotionally complex task of ordering food, were George and Thomas. Maybe that’s where Emily’s friends were today. Preoccupied dealing with their own deaths, too busy to come out and cry for hers. Even that possibility was ignoring the reality of the situation. George’s affection for Emily had been dark and twisted, and any friendship the two of them shared was built on lies. Thomas was an even more complex case. Zach could not tell if the two of them had actually got along, or if it had all been fake. Emily had seemed to like Thomas, but she had not known him. Not the real person that Thomas had been hiding within himself. Whether Thomas was able to see past the jealousy and the hurt that George had fostered, festering inside of him, and been able to see Emily as a friend outside of those last few painful hours, Zach did not know. It would take a better man than him to unpick that puzzle.

Sounds of car doors opening down at the graveyard’s entrance carried up the hill, and Zach looked over to see her, dressed more formally than ever before in her wooden box. It hurt. It still hurt, even though. Just in this moment, he could not marry the knowledge that Emily was safe in the woods behind him with the truth that she was there, lying in that box, waiting to be buried. A cold, dead, thing, no more alive than an autumn leaf. He watched them bring her, watched as the coffin was laid down into the ground. It was only then, once that task was complete, that he recognised one of the men who had carried her up the hill. Recognised was a rich word, as he had never met him before, but he knew him, nonetheless. There was some familiar cadence to the way he held himself, and the soft lines of his face, that made him look like half of someone Zach knew so well, that he could see her reflected here. The man was Emily’s father. There was no doubt about it.

Instinctively, Zach crept in towards him. He wanted something. Nothing specific, but contact. There was an overwhelming urge inside of him for human contact with this man, this living flesh part of Emily that still existed in the world. It took a while for Emily’s father to notice him, struggling as he must be under the weight of the day. When he did, he fixed Zach with a frown and waited to hear his point. Zach hoped he was not expecting some kind of carefully prepared condolence. He did not have it in him. Not on a normal day, and certainly not on this one.

“Mr. Wyatt?” Zach asked. The man gave a short nod.

“That’s right, son. Were you a friend of Emily’s?” What a loaded question that was. It was hard to label them as friends when they had only known each other for such a short time, but then, they were also so much more than that. How could Zach express that Emily had, in those two strange weeks, become the centre of everything?

“Yes… we worked together,” was what Zach eventually settled on. Her father nodded again, disinterested. No doubt to him, Zach was now just another one of the faceless goons that strained themselves answering the department phones. That, for some reason, was unacceptable. “On the case,” he added sharply. “We were together… on that.”

“On the case? Could you have stopped this from happening to her, then?” Zach shuddered away from the cool, blue stare that was centred on his face. Emily’s father did not appear or sound particularly harsh. His question was more routine than that. A plea for information, for reassurance. He was not so much looking for someone to blame, as he was looking to be told that there was no-one to blame. That Emily’s death had been inevitable and that no-one, not Zach, not him, and not Emily herself, could have prevented it. It was something pre-planned. Something that could not have been stopped by anyone. That was what he wanted, Zach thought. The reminder that this was just how the world worked sometimes. That it was just fate.

“No,” Zach said. “No, I don’t think so.” He saw the appeal in believing that Emily’s death was so inevitable it was out of anyone’s control. He would have liked to believe in that himself, instead of feeling the guilt of those moments when he could have done something differently gnawing at him, day and night.

“That’s a shame.” Emily’s father was clearly ready to drop it there, and walk away. Something that Zach could not yet let him do. He was not done, not ready to let go just yet. This man was not Emily, and Zach knew that it had been a long time since he had even spoken to his daughter, but he had some part of her in him. He was all that was left. Her last, lingering, physical presence.

“You know,” Zach began, shifting his weight and failing to make eye contact. “I helped Emily with a cooking project of hers recently. She was trying to make something that reminded her of her childhood. Eggs Benedict.” To Zach’s surprise, the other man began to laugh.

“What’s she making that old thing for?” he chuckled. “Always comes out wrong, no matter how hard you try. It always gets runny, or you end up with parts still cold. I’m betting it didn’t turn out much better for the two of you, did it?”

“Maybe not…” Zach muttered. The smell of the sauce, and the meat, when Emily had cooked for him that last time, was still fresh. It had tasted good, in his opinion. Hardly perfect, and not the sort of thing you would find in a restaurant. Nor was it a match for Thomas’ warm and fluffy baking, but it was something special all the same. It was a little messy and ill-prepared, the flavours overbearing in places, but it had had been warm and sort of special for its oddity. It was something only Emily could have made.

“She always tried hard at stuff… too bad it didn’t often go her way.” Zach could not argue with her father’s assessment. It did not do her justice, but the man was not wrong.

“When we were eating, she mentioned you,” Zach said. The laughter dried up quickly at that. “We were talking about how long it had been since the two of you spoke. She said she might call you.” Zach turned, sliding his eyes slyly towards Emily’s father to catch his reaction. “Did she?”

“No,” he answered. “She didn’t.” Here there was a silence, as the reality was absorbed. Zach regretted saying anything. Emily’s father could have happily gone on without knowing how close he had come to a final moment of catharsis with his estranged daughter. Now, it was going to hang over him. Probably forever. “Oh well,” the man said suddenly, laughing again, bitterly, to himself, and startling Zach. “That’s just Emily, isn’t it? Always putting things off, sure there’s gonna be time later. Should have warned her about that before now.”

Zach wanted to argue. He wanted to tell this man that Emily had always been the first to action, always at the head of the charge, ready to jump in and get things done. She took things seriously and would push long after everyone else would have given up. Then he remembered again how few people there were here today, how Emily’s friendships, the only close ones he had observed in all the time he had known her, were so distanced from reality that she had not even known who those people were. He thought of Emily, who was lonely, reaching out to him. How quickly the two of them had connected, really, in the big picture. There was an underscoring of desperation in how the two of them had been brought together. Because Emily was alone. She had been alone. The things she put off, so that she could focus on her work, or perhaps the work was a distraction to keep her too busy to think about it, those things were the emotionally important ones. Zach had listened once as Emily had told him, passingly, quite deliberately passingly, that when she had first come to Greenvale, the people had gossiped about her. Told stories, made up jokes. Had that sense of teenage isolation really carried through her whole adult life? And why not, he supposed. It had for him. He had been alone, too. Though at least he had had York on his side. Who had Emily had?

“She deserved more than this,” Zach said. He meant it as a simple, sad observation for himself. He had not realised it had come out of his mouth until Emily’s father replied.

“My girl was always stubborn,” he said. “No-one could have changed her. Like you said, friend, no-one could have helped her. She was on her own.” She was. Maybe she should not have been. Zach looked down at the ground, at the edge of the hole, where the grass stretched out like fingers, but not into the grave itself. That was a thing too much.

He needed to see her again. As soon as possible, perhaps tomorrow. Maybe even tonight, if the need became unbearable. He had to see her, and reassure himself that she was still there. Still safe. Still _something_. Emily was dead, but not gone. And not alone, either. He was there for her. How could he leave town, and leave her? She needed him. She needed him, because she had deserved better, and now the only thing left to give her was his time. Her life was lost, but he could share his with her. As much as he could give, he would.

Emily’s father would probably want to see her if he could. That had occurred to Zach about the families of all the dead, but this time, standing so close to the man, it was overbearing. Sallie would give anything for a last day with Anna, anything. Quint would want to see his girlfriend again, haltingly apologise through his tears for not doing better, not keeping her safe. Becky and Diane’s mother could have a moment to say the goodbye to her daughters that had been sorely missing in life. And Harry could perhaps unpick some of the many scars he had sewn into George, if he had the hours to do it. They would all kill for the opportunity, Zach was sure, and he knew that that was why they could not have it. It would do more harm than good to interrupt their mourning, more damage than anyone could imagine to reveal that goodbye was not the last word, after all. More importantly, none of them were here right now, standing by his side. He could forget them. Emily’s father was still here. His pain was still public, and Zach could not escape it, because he felt it too. He had been sorry for the others, sorry to see them buried young, sorry for failing them, and sorry to see the grief their loss had left. He had not mourned for them personally, though. Not as he did now, for Emily. This man beside him understood that loss, and that tempted Zach. He could give Emily this, he could allow something to happen that most people could never hope for, if he wanted to. The power was his.

Then Emily’s father shook his hand, said goodbye, and walked away, and the desire was gone. Zach was by himself again.

\- - -


	6. Hunger

**Chapter Six [Hunger]**

Carol woke up, arm cramped into a painful triangle above her head, lying on the sofa in her apartment. She had got into the habit of keeping her eyes closed when she first woke up, giving herself time to count to ten, or fifty, more often than not, maybe even a hundred. To let herself have a few more seconds asleep before she had to remember where she was. And then she opened her eyes, and saw her awful, empty apartment spreading out in all directions. She swung her legs down and sat up, stretching out her aching muscles.

Technically, she had lived alone for years, but because her apartment bordered Thomas’, and they had a door that led from one kitchen to the other, she was rarely completely alone. Usually, she could hear Thomas through the wall, if she woke up early enough. Maybe, when she had been out at her bar until five or six in the morning, and she woke up in the late afternoon, the next apartment would be quiet, but there would be something fresh to eat waiting for her when she went to look. Something he had made with her in mind, cooling on the side. Thomas also had a habit of picking up her things for her, when he was not too tired, or he browsed her records, or thumbed through her magazines looking for inspiration. Now, with him gone, nothing moved. She woke up and everything was right where she had left it. Unless she had another tantrum, like the first night she had come back here, and threw things around again. It had not helped.

Carol got up and went to the fridge to see what she was going to eat today. She had no idea if it was breakfast time or not, as her sleep schedule had been riotous since leaving the hospital. Her body did not know what it was doing, after so long spent barely conscious, and with the gnawing shock and horror that was still refusing to fade, throbbing like a tumour at the back of her brain, she tended to just collapse and fall asleep whenever she felt the slightest urge to. What did she have to be awake for, anyway? Whether it was morning or not, she was starving.

The past few days, she had been eating whatever was left in the cupboards. The first night that she had been free, after they released her from the hospital and she went over to the Galaxy of Terror, there had been no hope of her making it home. It was too much, too soon, and she had ended up sleeping on the floor of her dressing room in her clothes, curled into a ball. When she had woken, about four the next morning, she had been so hungry it hurt. Slowly, painfully, she had unwrapped herself from her own limbs, and got shakily to her feet, sent back home by the desperate need to feed herself. It had been just as bad as she had expected, coming back, knowing the next room over was completely empty. Now that she was back, however, she did not want to leave. She did not want to see anyone out there.

The fridge door swung open to reveal absolutely nothing. Carol stopped dead. She had been sure there was something left. Admittedly, she had never been much for groceries, as the array of take out containers and pizza boxes scattered around like spiderwebs proved, but Thomas had usually made sure she had at least something in the house. She had been living off his foresight for the past two days. Or three. Was it three? After two weeks in the hospital, a lot of the little that was left was spoiled. Still, wanting to avoid going into town above all else, she had found herself drinking milk over a week out of date, and tearing into a chunk of leftover pizza as hard as a stone. She had eaten the last dusty tin of beans in the cupboard, and even picked through a few stray pieces of vegetable that were left clinging to the walls of the freezer. In a panic, she searched through everything now, but all she could find were empty containers. Nothing was left. She was all out of food.

Sucking in a breath and snorting it back out of her nose, Carol made herself think. There were still options. She could order something, make someone bring her food. Of course, that would mean using the phone, and she could still barely speak. They would probably decide it was a prank and hang up before she could grunt out anything useful. It would never work. Her eyes darted around her kitchen until, with a thud, they landed on the door adjoining her apartment with Thomas’. He would have food in there. He always did. Ingredients to bake with, frozen leftovers he had lovingly made to save, tins and tins of fruit. Pie crusts, meringue, chocolates, and ham. Everything she wanted, and, her stomach loudly reminded her, needed. But it was in there. Past the threshold. Carol stood completely still, staring at the door. The room on the other side might as well be full of zombies, howling and banging and trying to eat _her_ , for how much she wanted to open it. Besides, if she went in there and violated Thomas’ apartment, and ate his food for such a measly reason as that she was hungry, it would be gone. The last things he picked out from the store, the last things he made, the last things he had ever touched. No. She would not do that. She could not bear to.

There was only one thing to do. She had been barely eating for days, and her stomach was empty. Not good normally, and especially not when her body was trying to mend itself. There was no fighting it anymore. She had to go outside.

Grabbing some relatively clean clothes from the top of the piano, Carol got changed as quickly as possible. She already wanted this to be over, and she had not even started yet. As she picked up her favourite jacket, she froze. That would be too obvious. If she had to go into town, she did not want to announce her presence to everyone. She dropped it, looking and eventually finding something less conspicuously hers. Not hers, in fact. It was an old, light grey hoodie. Anna had left it here, and she had never got around to giving it back or throwing it out. Too late for that now. Carol tried not to think about it as she zipped it on over her clothes and pulled the hood up over her greasy hair. A gift. It was just like a gift. As she went to open the door, lifting her arm, Carol noticed that Anna had cut holes in the sleeves for her thumbs, making it more her own. The jacket felt very tight for a moment.

When she got the door open, Carol saw that it was daylight. Probably about midday, from the look of it. She hurried down the steps outside her apartment, missing the usual click of high heels as she went. She was still sticking to flat shoes for now, just in case. If she ended up tripping and breaking her neck after everything, it would just be too stupid. Her car was parked down below, and she got in. Better to have a quick getaway ready. It took her a few minutes to get used to driving again, to get the feel of it back. Everything, no matter how small, felt odd after spending so much time lying down in the hospital bed. When it came back to her, she turned into the road and sped off, trying to decide where she was going.

The A&G Diner would be the first place she came to. It was just down the road, which was why she went there a lot. The coffee was always good, and when she felt like it, Nick managed to work up an excellent breakfast. Just thinking about the food was making her head cloudy, but she had to resist. It was a diner. It was way too public. She would have to sit down and eat in front of people. Even if she managed to stab the menu with her finger and convey that she wanted her food to go, she would still have to wait for it, standing in the middle of the floor while everyone hissed and stared. No way. The smarter thing to do was to go and get a few bags of groceries. That way she would not have to leave her apartment again anytime soon. One quick trip, and she was set for weeks. Nodding to herself, Carol made her decision. The Milk Barn it would have to be. It was further away, basically on the other side of town, and someone or other was bound to recognise her car on the road. But she was going 70MPH, and anyone who tried to slow her down was going to end up under the wheels.

There were a couple of cars in the Milk Barn parking lot when she pulled up. She recognised the huge van with the store’s name on it, but none of the others. That meant she was walking in blind. What was the worst case scenario? That Anna’s mom was in there, probably. Not that she would be. Carol knew she had been locked inside her house since Anna died. That was at least one person she would not have to deal with today. Unless fate had decided to have even more fun at her expense. She pulled the hood of Anna’s jacket down further, so that it covered her forehead and shielded her eyes, and pushed on the door.

It was not busy. A quick survey of her surroundings showed her that Keith Ingram was behind the counter, looking strung-out as he danced by himself, as usual. She could not see Lilly, but presumably she was around somewhere, stacking shelves and cleaning up after her husband. Other than that, she only saw a handful of strangers. They would probably know who she was by now, even if she had not met them before, but she bet they did not know her by her face alone. She was being offered a moment of safety. Already rushing, Carol raced to the shelves like she was trying to beat a record. She loaded her arms up with boxes of anything that looked like it would last in a cupboard, anything with sugar, and coffee. She hesitated in front of a case of beer, but thought better of it. Forget carrying that, if she needed a drink there was still plenty at her bar. Hopefully not contaminated by a runoff of rotting oysters. Arms aching from the weight of her hastily cobbled collection, Carol went up to the counter and buried it under an avalanche of cookie boxes, thinking to herself that she had better have brought her bank card.

Keith rang her up without much looking at her, distracted by whatever tinny tune was pumping through the air in his head. He bagged the groceries as he went, and Carol paid and hurried off with her stuff as quickly as it was humanly possible to do so. She took a long breath when she was outside the store again. Safe. Just as she was shoving the bags into the back of her car and getting ready to relax, she saw some dirty white cowboy boots sticking out from under the torn edges of a pair of jeans stride into her peripheral vision.

“Carol?” came the voice, already accusatory with just one word. He must have recognised her car and come over. Now she was cornered up against it, and there was no way out.

“Ye…” she muttered, failing to manage the ‘Yeah, Quint?’ she had aimed for. It was weird seeing him. It was weird seeing anyone, but especially someone she knew well. Quint had been a familiar sight at school, long before he and Becky had started sucking faces. Carol could remember a time, before her mother had died, when the Dunns had been considered family friends. ‘We come from the same place’, her mom had reminded her enough times that Carol had realised she was referring to more than just Greenvale itself, ‘People like us need to stick together’. It was an attitude she had maintained even though Richard Dunn’s bar was in direct competition with hers. She had liked Richard, and always wanted their families to get along. Thomas had been too old to ever play with Quint, being ten years above him, but he had been a willing babysitter for a while, back in the day. He had babysat all of them, actually, now that Carol thought about it. Quint, Anna, Becky, and her, at different points. The trusted big sibling of their group. Diane, of course, did not count.

“What are you doing out here, Carol?” Quint asked forcefully, trying to keep his voice steady, even as emotion threatened to let spill. She had no idea what he wanted her to say to that. It was obvious she had come out to buy food, but that was not the point. He was not asking what she was here for, he was asking why she had dared to show her face at all.

“Nth,” Carol mumbled. Nothing, she would have said. This inability to speak was seeming worse by the second. Quint took a step closer, getting in tight against her face, so that she could see the cold light in his eyes, and make out herself reflected in them.

“We all know what you did,” Quint spat, cutting into her as best he could. “Everyone. And you better believe anyone who hasn’t heard it’ll hear about it from me.” He looked her up and down, anger straining at the corners of his mouth. He was taller than her, and in this moment, that pissed her off. He had no right to be leaning over her like he was, lording in his innocence. Quint looked her dead in the eye with a scowl that snarled. “What kind of god would decide that _you_ deserved to live?” he hissed. Carol did nothing. With a bitter scoffing sound, Quint shoved her in the shoulder, before walking away. Carol stood for a few seconds before slamming the back door of her car, getting in, and speeding off as fast as possible.

The road was blurry, and no matter how much she blinked, her vision would not clear. Her cheeks were hot and damp, and her heart was racing so hard, she thought it might jump right out of the hole in her chest. She had no idea where she was going. She just had to drive. Keep going and going until she somehow ended up gone, gone from this town, from this life, from this horrible, fucked over reality she had woken up in. Drive until it was all gone.

By the time she stopped the car, having driven around in circles for longer than she would like to admit, Carol was parked on a street of houses, not too far away from her bar. She must have got to this part of town by sheer instinct. Shaking, she climbed out of the car and stood in the middle of the sidewalk. Her head was down, her hood was pulled forward. No-one could see her. She was just some faceless nobody. Irrelevant.

There were two women standing outside one of the houses, talking. Random parent-aged women who meant as little to her as she did to them. They had not noticed her, or did not care. Their conversation did not falter for a moment. Carol could hear it clearly.

“I heard they buried him, same as the rest of them,” one of them said. Her friend gasped for show.

“No! No way, right next to those girls?” Carol’s ears pricked, as she realised what they were talking about. As if anyone would be talking about anything else right now. It was the gossip of the decade. Greenvale’s very own backyard serial killer scandal.

“Yep, right next to them!” the first woman said. She probably thought she sounded grim, recounting this news, but Carol could hear that she was secretly excited. She gritted her teeth. The things that George had done, that she herself had done, had become something for these stupid people to have fun with. Something to know more about than their next-door neighbours. It was in bad taste. Why could they not see that?

“I’d never have stood for it, if I was one of their mothers.”

“Probably don’t have their heads on right, do they? After everything.” If that was meant to seem sympathetic, it did not, Carol thought bitterly. It was smug, and ghoulish, designed to lay judgement on people who had just lost their daughters. As if these two would be any better in their situation.

“None of us should stand for him being buried up there, though, should we? I mean, after what he did, he gets a funeral just like everyone else?” More unwanted opinions. More ignorant, stupid opinions from someone who had no idea who they were talking about. Carol balled her fists until the thumbs sticking through the holes in the sleeves were white.

“I know! My mom and dad are both buried up in that graveyard, and now they’ve got a killer for a neighbour!” The two women exchanged a little giggle, as if they were talking behind someone’s back. It was all Carol could take. She got back in her car and slammed the door loud enough that she thought she saw them both jump. Good.

George had already been buried, then. She had wondered about it, when she had not been able to stop herself, about what was going to happen to him. He had no family, and all his friends, if you could call them that, were dead. It seemed likely that the hospital had taken care of it, burying him like a dirty secret while people’s backs were turned. No-one else would have done it. Not even her.

There was no way for her to have ever watched them put George in the ground. Even if she had been in peak health, even if he had never attacked her, even if she felt comfortable going outside where she would run into other people. It would have always been impossible. Why? Because the George she had known could never die. He was beyond human. Immortal, infallible, invincible. Gods could never die. The fact that George had, meant that everything she had felt about him, all those big ideas they had shared together, had all been nothing in the end. Her vision of him had evaporated, like he had been an ice sculpture burned down from the bottom. Whoever was buried in George’s grave, it was impossible for her to accept that it was the same person she had known. George was gone, but not into the ground. He had just vanished, without a trace, like he had never been there at all.

At some point, she would have to worry about Thomas’ funeral. That was her responsibility, so she knew no-one would have done anything about it in her absence. It was not as if they had any other family to worry about. Their mother had been dead since Carol was fourteen, and Thomas had been the only one looking out for her since then. They had no other relatives in town, and even if she strained herself, she could not remember anything about her father. He had been gone her whole life, probably before. Thomas never mentioned him, and if she and her brother had not looked so alike, she would have assumed they had different dads. Whoever he had been, there was no trace of the prodigal dad anywhere in their home growing up, and Carol had built up a story in her head from the very sparse crumbs of knowledge she had that he had been in and out of the picture long before she was born, showing up just enough to accidentally bless her mom with a second kid. Then taking that news as a chance to disappear for good. It felt about right. More right the more she learnt about men.

Carol was snapped out of it when she heard someone tap on the window. It was one of the women who had been gossiping in the street, and her friend was close behind her. She wanted her to roll down the window to talk. No chance of that happening.

“Are you all right, honey?” the woman asked, her voice muffled from outside the car. Carol began to panic. There was a chance of them recognising her. She remembered Quint’s threat to make sure that everyone in town knew her, and she could believe he would go through with it. She had visions of him going door to door with their old yearbook and pointing her out. That’s her, that’s the girl who helped the murderer. She did it. Blame her.

The woman was trying to say something again, glancing at her friend for support, but Carol was not going to give them a chance to figure out who they were talking to. She started the car and revved the engine, and was pleased to see that the women immediately stumbled backwards. Good, she thought, get out of my face. She started down the road, struggling to remember where to put her feet.

This was just what she was going to have to deal with. Quint, these women, and everyone else in town. Anyone she could possibly run into would be the same. They had all been rocked by the deaths, by the sheer magnitude of what had happened. Crimes like this did not happen in Greenvale. A death was a one-off affair, and rarely anything more shocking than accidental. This was huge news, and people needed to make sense of it, which meant only one thing. They needed someone to blame. Sole survivor Carol MacLaine, the person who had helped orchestrate the serial killings, who had, did you hear this part?, actually been _romantically involved_ with the murderer, was just the person to absorb all the blame they had to vomit up before the sickness could pass. Who else was there? It had to be her. Carol scowled to herself, as she tried to get her breathing under control. All these people were hungry for someone to blame, and she was their last meal.

When she could think, Carol made the turning to take her to the Galaxy of Terror. She decided she might as well have that drink after all. And maybe a few more, depending on how she felt after that.

 - - -


	7. Remnants

**Chapter Seven [Remnants]**

“It’s funny to think I’ll never see another movie again.”

On cue, Zach twitched into a smile, but the truth was that what Emily had said made him sad. Even if she was laughing about it and did not seem to mind at all, the idea that, in one fatal moment, she had lost out on everything in the human world, as surely as if it had been sealed behind a wall of glass, was tragic in his eyes. Especially something like this. Emily had loved watching movies, he knew she had, just as York had, and as he did. He had not watched any lately, though. Movies were better shared together. Half the fun was splitting a secret director’s commentary with his best friend. Guessing what was coming, and shouting happily when they turned out to be right. There was no point now. Even revisiting their old favourites would just result in him replaying York’s usual snarky comments and wide-eyed excitement in his head, but without the man himself to say the words, there would be a distracting distance. As if he was hearing a faint echo of their friendship, with the voice that formed the words already silent.

“We never got a chance to watch one together, Emily,” Zach said softly. He had been looking forward to that, while the case was still going on. The three of them could have done it together. Back then, when Emily still had barely a conception of who he was, he would have been quite the third wheel. It took him back to the night she had come to their hotel room and York had told her about him, with Zach gently and nervously prodding at the edges of the conversation, an invisible presence whom York listened to throughout. He had been there in the room with York and Emily, but she had not known it. The two of them had only been able to meet at all thanks to her death. A fact which did not make him feel better about anything that had happened. He would have to be pretty selfish to consider it worth her dying for.

“Maybe you can talk me through a few new ones, as you see them,” Emily laughed, a sound as soft as a fairy light. Zach got the impression that she was going out of her way to be tender with him. He had done since they had started meeting like this. It felt as if she was reaching for him with gloved hands, careful not to leave fingerprints in the dust from his long absence that still covered him. Emily stepped around him like a doctor performing surgery on his heart, aware that the tiniest shiver might unpluck a string of stitches and start the bleeding all over again. There was no hiding the fact that he was wounded, inside and out, skin and skull, but Zach wished he could tell Emily that nothing she could do would hurt him. Just having her nearby radiated health in a way that was more effective than a thousand bandages. No doctor could ever fix him the way being near her could. That was why he was planning on never straying far away from her again.

Finding things to talk about was awkward, and Zach found conversation difficult enough already. It came naturally with York, as it was bound to, but no-one else. He had not truly talked to anyone else in so long, practically forever, that he was badly handicapped when it came to conversation. The extent of his experience was telling York what to say to people, fulfilling his duty as a more level-headed best friend and handing out advice, but York never copied his words exactly. York had always been the proof-reader for his thoughts. He made everything sound better, smoothing out the bumps in Zach’s suggestions, and it usually worked. Aside from those times when York’s impulsiveness got the better of him, and he ignored Zach’s advice completely, that was.

It was so hard thinking what to say to Emily, to keep her here, talking with him, knowing that the two of them were now living in different realities. He had a house to sleep in, a job to start worrying about again some time down the line, food to consider, and she had nothing. She needed nothing. Emily’s past was no longer important, and her future would never happen. She was stuck, in a single moment, like a cocoon that had been damaged, and was now fated to never hatch. How long before she forgot what it had been like to be human? How many months before she no longer related to the daily pangs of life, the routine, the up and down? A few years from now, would he make an offhand comment about having to get something for dinner, only for Emily, fixed forever without need, no stomach inside whatever afterlife light composed her body, to ask him what dinner was? He had to talk to her now, build something up now, while they were still close to the same. They were lines that had crossed at a single point, for just a second, and were now doomed to stretch in different directions forever. As he adjusted to the worries of the real world, and she sped swiftly away from them, they were being pulled apart, spinning into the distance until each one blinked out of the other’s sight.

“Emily.” He was still not tired of saying her name, having thought for a dreadful while that he would have to retire it from use forever. “Did you ever think about becoming the sheriff one day?” It came off as blunt, and Zach could hear it smack like a struggling fish against the flow of the conversation. He did not want to talk about movies anymore. It was painful. This topic, as it happened, had already been halfway on his mind.

“Not really,” Emily admitted, leaning down onto her knees, so that her dress swept across the ground. Zach had been sitting on a tree stump for the past hour, his knees unhappy about holding him up for such a long time, day after day. Aches still lingering from his ordeal during the case. A reminder to treat his body better in future, to stop taking risks. “I was still figuring my life out. I was only twenty-six. The sheriff’s department was a good place to work, and I liked feeling like I was helping people. I guess I never thought about it beyond that. I didn’t know.”

“It must be harder in a small town, when a promotion means replacing your boss, who’s also your neighbour,” Zach mused, thinking about George. He must have been sheriff for a long time. Maybe he had been training Emily for the job, to take over from him one day. All of George’s motivations were so hard to read. Understanding him as a killer was not that difficult, but as a man? It was next to impossible.

“Why do you ask?” Emily hovered on her knees in front of him, without any of the idle movements that might imply her legs were cramping, or that the ground was dampening the edge of her dress. She was transposed on the environment, she was not part of it. A candle flame, but not the candle.

“There’s no sheriff now,” Zach explained, ready to trace back his train of thought. “There was no-one obvious left to take over from George. Not with you, and even Thomas, gone.” Emily listened patiently, her dark blue eyes unwavering from his face, though Zach found it hard to keep eye contact with her for too long at a time. It gave him a twinge, like looking directly at a lightbulb, and made some deep part of himself feel that it might be unhealthy. “The people left in the department are treating me like the new sheriff. It doesn’t feel right.”

“Then you should tell them,” Emily said. Zach smiled weakly at her suggestion. He knew that, even if he wore a sign around his neck with it written in bold black marker, the ambient paper clerks of the sheriff’s department would still flock to him like a sea of chickens with their throats slit. He was all they had. The only thing they had to centre themselves around. And that went for the rest of the town, too, if they could catch him. People in Greenvale still talked to him as if he was some kind of authority, when he occasionally ran into them in the diner or the store. If only they knew he was not the person they had trusted at all, just someone wearing the same skin. Someone who was not prepared to shoulder everything that York had left him with. If only he could talk to him, Zach thought. York would know what to do.

Of course, Zach had his suspicions. He had a good intuition, if nothing else. The sort of sense someone could not help but develop after years in the FBI, even as a passenger. Accepting that Emily was still here, out in the forest, had been something for his mind to adjust to, but once that was settled as certain, a lot of other impossible things seemed a lot more likely. If she was here, then Zach had a strong feeling that, somewhere, in amongst those trees like a barely-sighted shadow, York was there, too. They all were. All the so-called goddesses who had died here during the case were wandering through the woods, failing to disturb a single twig with their weightless footsteps. He knew. He had seen the proof.

“Emily…” Zach said, and he watched her face immediately shift in recognition of his grave tone. “Is York in there with you?” Her expression said enough, even if he did not already know what to think. Her gaze drifted off from his face, suddenly unfettered, and her mouth opened slightly to err. Despite himself, Zach could not help but enjoy seeing that she still maintained the little touches that made her human. For how long, he did not know, but for now, at least.

“It must have been difficult to adjust to him being gone,” she said. Evading the question gracefully. Zach did not remember her being quite so tactful in life, but then he supposed that she had more time to consider things now. There was far less social pressure in death, especially with only one visitor.

“Why won’t he ever come out to see me?” Zach asked. Emily’s eyes drifted again, as she tried to find the right way to avoid his question. He did feel guilty, asking her about it in such a direct way. It must make evasion far harder. Still, nothing changed the fact that he needed to know the answer. For his own peace of mind, he had to understand. Eventually, Emily looked back at him, and smiled faintly.

“Zach,” she said softly. “You know it isn’t a matter of ‘won’t’.” Before he could digest this new sidestep, she leant over and took his hand in hers, cradling it in what was not really passable as another human’s flesh. She was not cold, or rigid, or otherwise obviously dead, nor did her hands have the cadence of something which has never been alive. Instead, it was like the sensation one gets when they close their eyes and allow themselves to swim in a memory, sunning themselves with everything they absorbed then. Leftover sensory data, like he was reliving the feeling he had felt before, but not what he was feeling in this moment. The same thing as pressing a photograph to your face, and letting it fill your vision. You can tell yourself that you see it, certainly, but it will always be in two dimensions, not three.

Zach clutched her hands with both of his, as tightly as he dared. Even this was better than nothing. Much better, he told himself. She was still here. Her mind, the person that had been Emily, was still here. He could bear any slight physical mismatch or discomfort just to be able to talk to her. After all, until recently, he had been the one trapped on the other side of the mirror. Being able to feel everything York felt did not compare to the presence that actually controlling their body offered. If he and Emily had held hands back then, one of them would still have been wrapped in plastic, distant from the physical world. Their relationship was like musical chairs, and the only difference was that they were now sitting on opposite sides of the room than where they had started.

“Let’s not waste this time we have together,” Emily murmured. Zach had to agree. All too soon, he would be back in town, struggling to function as if he was just like everyone else. He began to forget that her touch was not as it should be, to ignore the isolating quality of holding onto a person who was not really there. She was the only person he could talk to. The only one he could be honest with. He did not want to lose that chance.

Later, when he was finally willing to leave the shelter of the trees behind, Zach ran into Brian. He did not much like to be interrupted as he was sneaking away from the woods, still aware that it had the cling of a walk of shame to it, but Brian had clearly been waiting to talk to him. He had no real choice, considering what he relied on him for. Zach hoped he was hiding his disappointment as he faced off against the pallid, barely animate man opposite him.

“You are here… often,” Brian said. Zach could not resist an internal flinch. The grave keeper had chosen, if chosen was accurate to the situation, the right job. He needed to stay as far away from the living as possible. His twitching and flustered body language, the unwaveringly steady eye contact he kept once you had piqued his interest, and the jerky grind of his speech, were all such unsettling things to encounter in another person. Zach could understand why he was so starved for company. Although he knew that Brian was not at fault, he was what he was, every interaction was a fight against the urge to avoid him.

“I told you I would keep coming back, Brian,” Zach answered. The comment earned him a smile which, thanks to the way it peeled back Brian’s lips like wilting leaves, he would have preferred not to see. “Uh. Thank you for your help, again. I should…” He should have prepared an excuse in advance. His mind was still working slower than he would like, after everything he had put his head through lately. Brian jumped to fill the silence.

“Never… know what to say. S-so unused to… talking.” The phrasing put Zach in mind of awkward conversations he had witnessed between co-workers, trying to pretend their loyalty to one another extended beyond refilling the office coffee pot. Even worse, of uncomfortable date chitchat he had been an unhappy third wheel to, back when York had still made an effort in that regard. Always doing it for his sake, Zach thought, even if York had not admitted as much in words. It had always felt like he was putting them through their unsuccessful attempts at dating to make Zach happy. York had been more willing to take it or leave it.

“We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to,” Zach said, hoping to leave. Brian did not take the hint. He stepped hastily into Zach’s way, so that he was more trapped than ever, smiling again with a slight hint of stained tongue poking free. Zach decided he was done attempting eye contact. If Brian was so starved for conversation that he was going to insist on stretching out their time together like this, then they could put themselves through the process like the strangers they were. Zach was not in the market for a new friend.

“The woods are… much better at talking,” Brian said, faintly trying to laugh. “I hear… so much, coming from… there.” Zach nodded along with him, not wanting to contribute more than he had to. All he wanted was to be back in his unfamiliar rented house, sleeping, and waiting for his next opportunity to come back to the forest. To be with Emily. Brian was not stupid enough to completely miss Zach’s intention, and pushed the conversation on as best as he could by himself. “You know it, too. You hear… see… the woods are alive.”

“Brian,” Zach said, suddenly, not wanting him to continue tugging at this current topic. Not wanting to have to discuss what he wanted from the woods. “Are you the same as… they are?” No names, he decided. “The other people living in the woods, I mean. Are you similar to them?” He was not entirely sure what he was asking. Are you also dead, violently, like they are? Perhaps he was asking the person who held the key to his deepest need to relive the cruellest moment of their life, and the end of it. Though, if there was one thing he had learned recently, it was that death was no sort of ending. Brian went still and craned his neck to the side, pushing it further than could possibly be comfortable. Thinking that, Zach realised he had no idea if Brian could feel pain, or even discomfort. He had no real idea how any of this worked at all.

“Not… exactly, the same,” Brian said half-heartedly, after making him wait for such a meagre morsel of an answer. Zach must have let his disappointment show, as Brian hastily added an extra thread of information. “They are all… connected. Not me.” That made some sense, insomuch as any of this ever could. The other goddesses, or victims, as they had been in death, were tied by the same ball of red twine. Brian pre-existed them, something older, whose involvement with the case had been little more than raising his arm to point the way forward. He was no part of their world, merely the signpost that aimed towards them.

“Thank you, Brian,” Zach said. He made another attempt to slip away, sneak off and head home, but Brian was still starved of any living human contact, and was unwilling to be parted so soon. He crept forward again, until he was occupying Zach’s personal space far too forcefully. Zach turned his head. For some reason, the lack of anything was actually more unpleasant than if he had felt Brian’s breath on his face.

“I… am not waiting…” Brian said cryptically, and Zach scrunched his face in response. He had no interest in unpicking more riddles right now, if that was what this was. He was done with that. Sleep, food, and as much time as he could possibly steal spent by Emily’s side. Those were the only focuses right now. The only things he could stand to want.

“At least it’s over now,” Zach said. “For them, I mean. The case is solved. They can move on.” A lingering shred of tact prevented him from asking whether or not that was what was keeping Brian fettered here. If some unsolved business was holding him back. That, he reminded himself, was probably reserved for movies. Even if it was not, it would be rude to ask. He could almost feel a smile coming on as he thought that York would not have stopped himself from blurting something out. He would have asked, if it was still him here.

“Solved, yes,” Brian agreed. He finally eased away enough for Zach to breathe more comfortably, but still remained upsettingly close.

“The… town is back to normal again,” Zach went on, hoping to edge away as he spoke. To his delight, Brian did seem distracted by what he was saying, and he was able to take a few secret steps towards freedom. “With the Raincoat Killer gone, everyone will be safe. And F… Forrest as well.” It was still a little difficult to say that name out loud, after what had happened. Zach cleared his throat to cover for his hesitation, as if his stumble had been nothing more than a dry tongue. “All the danger has been dealt with.”

“Evil… not entirely purged. Remnants… still here.” Zach curled his lip unconsciously at Brian’s words, and looked over in the direction of the red trees that he could just make out from where he stood. It was true that someone would need to get rid of them, though without Forrest to guide people’s hands and, disgustingly, grow any more, he felt it could wait for a while. All the seeds were stillborns now.

“I’m sure the trees can be taken care of later, Brian,” Zach said. Brian reacted to the brush off by twitching and shaking his head. It made Zach shiver, reminding him too much of the shadow creatures that had risen like bubbles in oil throughout Greenvale during the case. Maybe there was a reason for that, and the similarity certainly did not inspire him to any longer conversations with the sleepless grave keeper.

“Not… seeds,” Brian said, shaking his head more aggressively to make his point. “Something else. Something… left over.” Zach narrowed his eyes. Brian looked up at him with a straight mouth and an incessant stare. There was something to what he was saying, and Zach would be foolish to completely overlook it, just because he found the messenger unnerving. York would have been better at this. York would probably have already got the answer out of him, while Zach was wasting time analysing the situation. It was going to take years to build up anything even slightly close to York’s people skills. And to think, Zach used to always poke fun at the way he managed to wind people up without even meaning to. It was only now that he was by himself that he could see how well York had managed to lead people by the hand to where he needed them to go. The man might never have been a success at small talk, but he was an expert at extracting information from people. Zach had little more than the first card up his sleeve. The one called asking.

“What is left over, Brian?” His question brought a jagged smile to Brian’s face. It was shakily, inappropriately excited at the prospect of there being more to say. Zach sucked in a sharp breath and sighed to himself. “What is it?”

“You… want to fix it?” Brian asked. Zach shuddered at the idea. There was something left, something more to do. A loose end to find, and fix. A last thing that York had overlooked. And now that York was gone, it was up to him to find it, cut it, and finish it. This last thing was his responsibility, and his alone. After all, there was no-one else left. He was the only one still stuck on this side of the curtain.

 - - -


	8. Imaginary Futures

**Chapter Eight [Imaginary Futures]**

Carol lay spread out on the floor, a body in a smoking pyre of crumpled magazines and spent cigarette ash, coughing. She took another slug from the unwashed glass at her side, finishing it off, in an attempt to dispel the taste of bile stinging the back of her throat. She had no idea what time it was, yet again, and with all natural light denied entry to her apartment, she had no way of finding out. Time might as well have stopped, anyway. What did she care? She had not properly slept all night, slipping in and out of blackouts instead, whenever the drinking caught up to her.

She had started her binge at the Galaxy of Terror, drinking there for several hours, sprawled out on top of the bar with one leg thrown over the other. When it got dark, and the shadows on the walls began to close in, ready to remind her what had happened below the bar, she had gathered up a random selection of bottles and struggled back to her car. How she had managed to make it home in her condition, she did not remember, or even understand. The roads must have been quiet. Of course, if she had got into a wreck, drunk-drive-dragging herself back from her bar, there was no-one left to miss her. And she would certainly not have missed the world.

Since crawling back through the door of her apartment, she had not stopped once. The only brief breaks from pouring alcohol down her throat came when she passed out or threw up, both of which seemed to have happened to her a lot. Knowing how often, however, was far beyond her. It was all one long blur. The fresh slurry of bile that she could hear gently dripping down the side of her piano stool and onto the floor reminded her that the last incident had been recent. Struggling to her feet, she decided to get a glass of water. Keeping herself alive might be almost too much of an effort, but the least she could do was get the taste of vomit out of her mouth. It took three tries to get back on her feet, but she managed in the end, and was standing in front of the sink before she was aware of how she got there. She poured warm water straight into her glass, and drank it as quickly as possible, half-choking as it went down. Again blanking on how it happened, finding a few seconds stolen from her memory, she found she was now collapsed on the sofa, and stretched herself out. The water did something for her, soothing the frayed wires in her brain, and allowing her to think for the first time in hours. A mixed blessing, for sure.

“Shig,” Carol mumbled, catching herself off guard with the mangled word. She had got used to not hearing anyone’s voice, and she had not entirely meant to speak aloud. Her mouth was still a mess, and getting out anything more than a grunt was work. It was just as well she had no-one to talk to.

That was something. Imagining going through this kind of recovery with people by her side. What if she had been in Anna’s place, a first victim, instead of an attempted last, and yet still somehow ended up like this? This state of not fine, but living. She would have woken up in the hospital to find Thomas holding her hand, drifting off from lack of sleep. He would have been there the whole time she was out. By the time she could sit up in bed, there would be piles and piles of muffins and cakes for her to drown her sorrows in. When the doctors tried to tell Thomas she could not eat solid food, he would sit patiently and tear tiny chunks off his hard work and feed them to her in secret. Later, Anna, maybe even Becky, would come to visit. Anna would hug her, forgetting that she was in no state to be hugged, and then apologise for being careless. Becky would stand awkwardly at the side, no good at dealing with big problems, but she would have fancy chocolates and a signed card behind her back. Anna, no doubt, would insist on taking a photo of them all. Proof they were still alive.

But they were not. They were gone. No-one had been there when Carol woke up.

“Ag…” Carol said experimentally, trying to get the name out just to see if she could. “Aga…” Barely a creak. “Beh… ee.” Next to nothing. Maybe when she finally went back to the hospital for a check-up, something she was sure she was already supposed to have done, they would begin the process of teaching her how to talk again. There had to be something. People who broke their legs or their spines slowly tried to relearn how to walk. People who had their tongues partially severed had to go to some kind of vocal physical therapy. Maybe. What did she know about it? It did not matter, because she did not want to go back to the hospital. If there was any chance of them looking her over and deciding to put her back in a bed, “for her own good”, “to rest up”, then she would rather die alone in this room right now.

Alone. She really was too alone, here. It was too quiet. For once, she wished she lived closer to the centre of town, where there would be more noise going by outside the window. Cars passing and feet shuffling and dogs barking. Something, to drown out the nothing. She got shakily to her feet, jerking forward, and reached for the nearest bottle before collapsing back into the sofa. At least the squeak it made was a second-long distraction, a tiny something. She popped the top off the bottle and took a drink, letting it sting the inside of her mouth, and followed it with another. She had no time to be getting sober, though the way she was going there was no risk of that. She was more likely to drown in the neck of the bottle than wind up with a clear head.

Carol shut her eyes and sunk into the warm, dizzy feeling that was waiting to swallow her up. It was tempting to let herself black out again, disappear a little longer, but in this moment it was also possible to pretend that everything was still all right. Right now, she wanted to play that game. She wanted to pretend she could hear people through the wall, laughing together, all taking part in putting the finishing touches on some cupcakes. Something like that. She scrunched up her face, throwing an arm over her closed eyes, with a scowl. It was no good. It felt stupid, and too unreal. Nothing like that had ever happened when they were alive. It was definitely not going to happen now.

If Anna was alive, she would not be wasting her time over here, trying to cheer up Carol. She would probably be at home, with her mom, making her feel better about everything that had happened. Reassuring her that she was okay. That she made it. If things were really rewound and Anna had remained an outsider to everything, if she had never been brought into the club, or met George, or any of it, she would be watching TV. Sitting in her living room, mouth wide open, as she watched the updates with Sallie. Nodding along as her mom talked about how glad she was to have a daughter who would never dream of getting mixed up in that kind of mess. By now, Anna might have got the courage up to sneak off to some of the crime scenes with her camera, to steal a few snapshots. That was the kind of person she was. Had been, after all. At the end of the day, she could go home, safe in the knowledge that nothing had touched her, and start planning the trip she and her mom had been going to take. She had been talking about it in gentler moments before she died, bragging about how she was going to sit on a proper beach and get tanned. At the time, Carol had rolled her eyes over the flimsy attempt to make the rest of them jealous. It was screwed up to admit she actually was a little jealous of her now. Anna had gone out first. She had not had to deal with any of the aftermath. She certainly was not here, still, dealing with this.

Even if they had both lived, there was no future to their friendship. Carol did not have a hard time imagining her and Anna drifting apart. Once she had graduated, and saved up some money, Anna was planning on taking the first bus out of town, and never coming back. She would do it, too, and Carol knew that her position as the high school friend who had never managed to move more than twenty feet away from where they were born would look a lot less cool once Anna crossed the state line. That was the centre of it. Anna could have gone somewhere. Got into modelling, worked at it, like she wanted. Been everyone’s favourite, enjoying a kind of popularity far, far greater than a small-town prom queen could even imagine. Then she could marry rich, settle down, and slowly sink into a real life. Something kind of boring, maybe, but elegant and expensive, that would have been more than enough for her. Would that grownup Anna have even a faint memory of Carol by that point?

“Ug ee ig,” Carol mumbled, failing to get ‘would she shit’ out properly. It was true, though. They would never have stayed friends for long. Anna would have had something better in her life within months. As for Becky, that one was just silly to think about. Carol and Becky had struggled to maintain a friendship outside of Anna already. They never spent time together without Anna around. If Becky was alive right now, she would be under lock and key and Quint’s constant, vigilant supervision. He would have his arms around her for a full month, at least, before he let her go anywhere by herself again. Grotesque. Carol could not bear that kind of relationship. She had no idea how Becky had put up with him for so long, especially after she joined the club and got involved with George. She had to see what an upgrade that was from her childish, oil-stained cowboy. The only reason they were still together was because Becky hated confrontation. At least, that was what Carol had decided long ago. Remembering the way Quint had talked to her yesterday, if the grocery store incident had been yesterday, did nothing to reassure her that he was actually boyfriend material. Becky just had bad taste, she supposed.

The two of them might actually have got married at some point, Carol thought, shivering at the very idea. Anna would be the bridesmaid, and Becky might have asked Carol as well, in some version of reality, just to fill out the numbers. And because she would feel guilty if she did not include her. Would Becky have made her sister a bridesmaid, too? The idea of Diane strutting around in an ugly, frilly dress made Carol snort with drunken laughter, dribbling snot down her lips. She wiped it away with the back of her hand, swilling vodka from the bottle to symbolically sterilise it. That was unlikely, then. Diane was the type who would rather sit and watch than take part. Carol was fairly sure that Diane had never counted herself among Quint’s fans, either. She seemed to have much better taste than that. Carol did not like Diane much, pretentious and narcissistic as she had always found her, but she would never deny that she had her head on right about a lot of things.

There was no mystery about what Diane would have done if she had been left alive. She was the kind of person who would never change. Carol could not remember her being different, no matter how far back she looked, and she could not picture Diane becoming anyone else, no matter how long she had lived. She would stay in her gallery as she aged and slowed down until, one day, she stopped moving altogether and became one of her own exhibits. Not too far off where she had ended up in reality, though Carol would not have imagined it being such a sudden and violent process. Still, she wondered if Diane had secretly liked becoming part of her art. It seemed like something she might have wanted, somewhere in her head. George had told her about the scene after it happened with amused glee, and it was hard to deny that, in that moment, Diane had got what she wanted. At least, she got what the red seeds made her want. They made you want some strange, twisted things.

Carol was dangerously close to thinking about the real world again. She shook her head until she felt sick and sucked up another swallow from her bottle, starting to feel faint. Back to dreamland. Back to where she was a moment ago. She could almost see it. Becky… Becky and Quint, getting married. In her head, she dressed him up in some horrible white polyester cowboy outfit, hat and boots and all the trimmings, clashing awfully with Becky’s prim and pricey wedding dress. What a sight! She had to laugh. They were like a discounted cake topper, one too ugly and mismatched for anyone to ever want to buy. Carol had never actually been to a wedding before, so she had to imagine it based on what she had gleamed from movies. That worked. It made it into more of a farce, which is what it would have been, if it had happened. Who would Quint even have asked to be his best man? He never seemed to spend time with anyone except for Becky and his dad. He must have had friends at school before the two of them started dating, but since then he had sunk every second he was not at work into Becky. Trying to become a part of her life, her world. Good luck, as if that would ever happen. Even if Becky did feel sorry enough for him to marry him one day, he would always stick out like a sore thumb when he was standing beside her.

Ten years on, Becky and Quint would have a bunch of ugly kids nipping at his heels and tugging at her skirts, crying and wanting attention, just as needy as their parents had been. Carol could imagine them running to Diane for help, as if Diane would ever lower herself to babysitting. Becky would have no hope. When Anna came back to visit, all aglow with success, she would hardly recognise her old friend. Anna and Becky would keep in touch, through all the years, comparing lives, politely writing emails saying they wished they had what the other one did. Neither of them meaning it, because they got to where they were supposed to be. The only thing Carol could not decide was whether Becky would manage to escape for a few years to go to college before she let Quint bleed all her potential dry. Not that it really mattered. Becky was rich, and she hated anything difficult. She would probably stay in Greenvale until she died, even though she did not have to. Well, she had done, Carol reminded herself. She had died here, she was dead. They were all dead. And even if they were not, even if they were living still, none of them would be here with her now. They had these perfect lives waiting for them, maybe not actually perfect, and maybe not what _she_ would want, but perfect for them. And she was not even in the background.

Carol forced her eyes open, willed the room to be slightly stiller, and sucked in breaths, steadying herself. These were just daydreams, she remembered. Nothing more than the imaginary futures that her friends might have had. Hell, they were stupid fantasies, and they probably would not have come off. Anna was more likely to stay stuck at the diner, washing dishes until she died from a heart attack, rotting in her room in her mother’s old house, than become a model like she wanted. Becky and Quint were never going to work out long-term. He had nothing to give her. He could only ever be weight on her back, the townie trash keeping her from doing something with her life. She would have gone off to college, forgotten about him, and married some boring, flat, rich boy she met in class. She would only think about Quint when she flicked through her old yearbook, fondly for a moment, before closing the cover and putting him away again. They would not have been happy. They would not have got what they wanted. No-one ever did. No-one _ever_ did. But even then, even now, Carol could not make herself believe it. They had a chance at least. They could have made it, if they worked themselves hard, if they wanted it enough. Who was she to tell them they were hopeless?

The person who helped kill them, that was who. Carol shook as she choked back tears, wiping futilely at her face, stopping nothing. The only reason that Anna and Becky were not going to live the lives they had planned was that she and dragged them into her quagmire, pulling them along behind her like a fatal game of follow the leader, before pushing them over the edge. She had stood by and ignored as they cried out for help, watched them drown, and now they were gone. Just rotting away under the surface. She did that. She took everything from them.

Maybe some part of her had known that George’s plan was not going to work out. She could not remember anymore if she had had any doubts about it, and hidden them, even from herself. It was such a ludicrous plan in hindsight. None of them had any idea what was meant to happen when it was over. It was easier to tell herself that the deaths were worth it when the end result was this great unknown, this exciting possibility that no-one truly understood. It was easier to gamble for the mystery than to weigh up her friends’ futures against her own. Uncertainty on all sides. Even if she was happy to sacrifice the Anna who spent her life wasting away, working at the diner, for the future where George got everything he had said he would, was she as happy to sacrifice that glowing, successful model Anna for a future where George’s plan was just a fairy tale? Because she had done that, really. She had traded all the possible future Annas for nothing, and that was exactly what she was left with now, nothing.

Some part of her wondered, as she sat there, stifling waves of noisy sobs, if she had not done it on purpose. Not because of George, but because she was jealous of all those possibilities. Whichever future Anna and Becky ended up in, she was not going to be part of it. She knew that. She had known it for a long time. They spent time with her because she was older, and she owned a bar, and she let them drink with her. She was the stereotypical cool high school friend, and that was a type who did not age well. A year out of school, or a few weeks, even, if they got out of Greenvale, was enough to take the shine off Carol. She was nothing special. They would have seen that quickly enough, and disappeared, one way or another. Anna and Becky had a friendship based on something real, but Carol was not part of that. She was not part of their lives at all, not really, not in any significant way. She had taken their futures from them, knowing she was not taking anything from herself, because there was no reality, no possibility, where she was part of their something bigger.

“Nnuh… nn… no!” Carol sobbed, rocking herself. The bottle she had been holding was broken on the floor, and she had not noticed it happening. It just had. Everything had just happened, before she noticed, before she could stop it. She had not known, she had not done it on purpose. She did it for George. She did it for the life they were meant to have together. Her, and George… and Thomas.

That was right. Anna and Becky, and certainly never Diane, would not be here looking after her, even if they were still alive, but Thomas would be. He would never have left her side, from the moment he brought her home from the hospital. He should be here now, with her now. In fact, she should not be like this at all. She should be fine, and Thomas should be here, because George was supposed to win. And he was supposed to take them with him.

It seemed stupid to admit it now, but before everything had turned to ash, Carol had had a very different vision of where the three of them would end up. George trying to kill her was actually a surprise, at least, she thought it was. If she had expected it, she had suppressed it. Everyone else might have seen which way the wind was blowing, but she had done an enviable job of convincing herself it was all going to be fine. It all centred, like everything else seemingly had, on Emily Wyatt. Emily would never come around the way George had wanted. She did not see him for who he really was. She had never _appreciated_ him, not like Thomas and Carol had. Why he even liked her, Carol had no idea, especially not why he liked her more than anyone else. Because he could not have her, she supposed. That was how it usually was with men. They all seemed to find a challenge the most fun thing there was in the world, and George had been a hunter, so he took that idea even further than most. There was nothing special about Emily, not that Carol saw, so that was the only way she had ever been able to think of it.

Carol’s fantasy for the future had been that George would get tired of the chase, realise it was hopeless with Emily, and give her up. With Anna, Becky, and Diane already dead, he would realise that Thomas and Carol were enough for him. Then, finally, it would all become obvious to him. The fourth victim should be the woman who had insulted him for years, the one who hurt him, who ruined him. The only logical end to his obsession was for George to kill Emily. It was what Carol had been waiting for. What she had hoped for all along, as she watched her friends drop like flies around her. It was the whole damn point, in fact. She and Thomas had done everything for George. Anything he asked, and anything he wanted, without so much as an argument. He owed it to them to kill Emily so the three of them could end up together. Perfect, happy, shining like the sun. It was how it was supposed to be. Why could George not see that? Why could he not see that that was the future they were supposed to end up in?

Carol shuddered, feeling another wave of sickness rising up her throat. She should at least try to make it to the bathroom this time. As she struggled to her feet, clinging to the arm of the sofa, she scowled to herself. She wondered where Emily was now. Making the sheriff’s department her own, probably. Standing in George’s office, taking down all his things. It disgusted her to think about it, about that woman, touching George’s things, now that he was gone.

One thing was certain in Carol’s mind. Wherever Emily was now, she had not got what she deserved.

\- - -


End file.
